Ten days later Wren’s small force brought off a well-planned coup, capturing the caique Saint George with all its cargo and the crew of five Greek nationals, together with the reception party of eight Cypriots, on the desolate beaches near Khlorakas. The prime mover appeared to be Socrates Loizides, expelled from Cyprus in 1950 for his seditious activities. A document which he obligingly brought with him revealed the existence of a “well-armed and organized secret revolutionary organization EMAK, which was to overthrow the Cyprus Government.” He had apparently been working on his preliminary manifesto when Wren gave the order to close in, for it was unfinished though full of the usual rhetorical flourishes which I had heard in every coffeehouse of the capital during the past year; he also carried on this operation—a typically Cypriot touch, this—an English grammar: he had, it seems, been brushing up his irregular verbs during his non-revolutionary spare time. (He is still studying hard, I learn, in the Central Prison at Nicosia and nobody need show surprise if he takes his Matric. by correspondence at some time during the next ten years!) All tragedy is founded in human comedy, and even here, at the turning-point in our affairs, the spirit of the irrational which always hovers over the Greek scene kept brushing us with its wings; it was impossible at Paphos, when the trial opened, not to be amused by the gallery of desperadoes who sat in the dock, so perfectly did they symbolize the ignorant and lovable peasantry of those islands where so many thousand Commonwealth troops were given shelter after the collapse in Greece. Paddy Leigh Fermor reappeared briefly to cover their trial and together we sat in the narrow little dock-house at Paphos, while the mob howled and banged outside the courthouse, and fragmented the learned exchanges of lawyers with the sound of breaking glass and characteristic ululations. Of course they were all mad by logical standards; worse, blissfully unaware of the moral guilt of their position in law as felons. This was what shocked the jurists. They showed absolutely no sense of civic conscience—nor for that matter very much revolutionary bite. The whole thing had the air of a good-natured farce—it belonged to that operatic world of fictions based in the Greek attitude to modern history. Loizides himself, a painfully shy man, awkwardly constructed and of spiderish aspect, who wore glasses of a high magnification, conducted himself like a schoolboy convicted of roasting an aunt. He carried his black little Japanese head low; but the others reveled in the limelight—the Cypriots were particularly good types, easy to replace imaginatively by any of my villagers. They beamed when the sentences were passed and cocked an appreciative ear to the hubbub outside. They felt themselves to be heroes and martyrs.
We for our part were filled with a quite unjustifiable elation at the trimness and expertise of Wren’s little operation; it proved that the Police Force, though small, could be used efficiently—and indeed it was to accomplish marvels for its size and state of hopeless disrepair throughout that stormy year.
“Still in the operatic phase”: the phrase has much to commend it. “But what happens,” asked my brother idly, “when in the middle of the opera a real shot rings out and an actor falls dead?”
“It will never reach that pitch,” I said.
“I wish I could be sure,” he said.
So did I but I could not say so.
Chapter Eleven: The Feast of Unreason
Branches of orange, lovely with flowers;
seven are the Bridesmaids who sew the bed.
Into the Bride’s hall flew two nightingales;
they came to bring her English needles.
—Cypriot Greek bridal song
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice neither is in my opinion safe.
—EDMUND BURKE
WAS THE CHOICE of the Ist of April fortuitous? I do not know. It was not inappropriate. We had spent the long tranquil evening walking upon the battlements of old Nicosia, watching the palms flicker in the twilight wind which the dusk brings across the bony Mesaoria. The ravens creaked home on weary wings to the tall trees by the Turkish Athletic Association, where nobody ever smiled.
My brother was due to leave, and as a tribute to him and the noisome menagerie he was taking back with him, we had friends in to drink his health, and to stare (holding their noses) into the crates and cardboard boxes which housed his catch, and which temporarily occupied my spare bedroom. Afterwards we dined by candlelight and talked, and were on the point of going to bed when the silence of the little town began to ripple and bulge all round us. Parcels of steel plates began dropping from heaven on to paving-stones, while pieces of solid air compressed themselves against the window frames making them jingle. Something appeared to walk up the garden path and lean against the front door, something of immense weight—a mammoth perhaps. The door burst open to reveal the dark garden and the heads of flowers tossing in the idle night wind. Then something appeared to go off between our teeth. “I take it you are trying to say goodbye to me appropriately,” said my brother. “Believe me, I am honored.”
A string of dull bumps now, from many different quarters at once—as of small geological faults opening in the earth somewhere along the battlements of the fortress. We ran down the steps and along the unlit gravel road to where the main road joined it. A few bewildered-looking civilians stood dazed in the shadows of the trees. “Over there,” said a man. He pointed in the direction of the Secretariat building which was about two hundred yards down the road. The street lamps were so few that we ran in and out of pools of darkness on the fringes of the unpavemented highway. We came round the last corner abreast and walked into a wall of solid yellow fog smelling strongly of something—cordite? In the vagueness figures walked about, aimlessly, with detached curiosity, uncertain whether to go or stay. They did not seem to have any more business there than we did. There was a tidy rent in the wall of the Secretariat out of which smoke poured as if from a steam engine. “Dust,” said my brother grimly, “from under the administrators’ chairs.” But there was no time for jests; somewhere a siren began to wail in the direction of Wren’s headquarters. A lorry load of police materialized vaguely out of the yellow coils of fog. And then another series of isolated bangs and, after an interval, a deeper growl which was followed by a sudden small contortion of the still night air. “The whole bloody issue is going up,” said my brother fretfully; he had been peevish all evening about the failure of his film which had run into difficulties, he said, due to a sudden wave of non-cooperation which followed hard upon a visit by the parish priest to his actors. “Wherever I go there’s a bloody revolution.” He had just come back from Paraguay where they had revolted under him, so to speak. A bang nearer at hand lent wings to our purpose. “I must get back to my animals,” he said. “The owls have to be fed.”
But I felt the tug of other duties. I took the car, ignoring the fretful pealing of the telephone in that silent, book-lumbered hall with its dripping candles, and raced down to the Police Headquarters at Paphos Gate. It had a forlorn deserted air, and was, apart from one sleepy unarmed duty sergeant, unguarded as far as I could judge. In the operations room on the top floor the Colonial Secretary sat at a desk tapping a pencil against his teeth; he was wearing a college blazer and trousers over his pyjamas, and a silk scarf. Behind him the two clerks crouched in an alcove beside the receiving set which scratched out a string of crackling messages in Doric English. “Famagusta … a bomb in the garden of … Larnaca an attack on… a bomb thrown at a house in Limassol.…” He glanced at the signal pads as they were hurriedly brought in and placed before him. He was composing a message to the Secretary of State. He looked up quietly and said: “I suppose this is the sort of thing you meant?” “Yes, sir.” “The worst thing so far is the radio station. Five masked men tied up the watchman and blew it up.”
By now the press had begun to block the meager lines and I diverted them to an outer office where I dealt with them as faithfully as I could; but police reports were very slow in coming in and in many cases the Agencies were hours ahead of us. (They were to remain so for many a long month
to come.)
The radio station was indeed badly blitzed, but it was lucky in the possession of an engineering staff which had been eating its heart out for a chance like this; by two o’clock the engineers had crawled into the wreckage and produced a fairly detailed report on the damage and the welcome information that one of the transmitters had escaped, which would allow of some sort of program going out next day, on reduced power.
By the time I got home again to the importunities of the telephone—which thenceforward was to ring on an average every six minutes, night and day—the picture was clearing and becoming coherent. The attacks had been island-wide and synchronized. Leaflets, scattered in the street of the capital, spoke of an organization calling itself EOKA (ETHNIKI ORGANOSIS KYPRION AGONISTON), which had decided to begin the “struggle for liberty.” They were signed DIGHENIS, an ominous enough name which, to the Greek mind, rings the same sort of bell as Robin Hood does to our schoolboys. He is a hero who belongs to a cycle of medieval folk songs; his battles are famous and he fears no one, not even old Charon, Death. Did he not, in the course of one of them, leap across from Asia Minor and leave his fingerprints on Pentadactylos, in Cyprus, before recovering his balance and leaping back?
Next morning the swollen-eyed headlines covered the front pages of the world press and in fits and starts the power lines grew heavy with questions and answers, with telegrams and messages, the idle flickerings of the world’s frontal brain; and the press corps began to swell.
Yet the morning, like some perfect deception, dawned fine, and nobody walking about the calm streets of the town, watching the shopkeepers taking down their shutters and sipping their morning coffee, could have told that some decisive and irrevocable action had taken place in the night; a piece of the land had broken away, had slid noiselessly into the sea. In a sense now there was no more thinking to be done. We had reached a frontier. From now it would be a question of hanging on. Such solutions as those we had dreamed about were all thrown into relief by the ugly shadow of impending insurrection. And yet everywhere there were doubts. The ordinary people of Cyprus went about their work with the same friendly good-manners, many of them genuinely shocked by the work of “hotheads” and genuinely grateful when the Governor described them as “law-abiding.” I concluded that EOKA must consist of a small body of revolutionaries, unknown to the general public. Wren did not share this view. “What would you say,” he said dryly, “if every sixth-form boy in every public school in England had signed this oath?” His agents had brought in a new document.
YOUTH ORGANIZATION OF EOKA
Oath
I swear in the name of the Holy Trinity that:
1. I shall work with all my power for the liberation of Cyprus from the British yoke, sacrificing for this even my life.
2. I shall perform without question all the instructions of the organization which may be entrusted to me and I shall not bring any objection, however difficult and dangerous these may be.
3. I shall not abandon the struggle unless I receive instructions from the leader of the organization and after our aim has been accomplished.
4. I shall never reveal to anyone any secret of our organization neither the names of my chiefs nor those of the other members of the organi zation even if I am caught and tortured.
5. I shall not reveal any of the instructions which may be given me even to my fellow combatants.
If I disobey my oath I shall be worthy of every punishment as a traitor and may eternal contempt cover me.
Signed
EOKA
“Moreover,” he went on, “there appeared to be plenty of bombs to go round—we’re scooping the stuff up all over the island. They seem mostly homemade; the village smithies appear to have been working overtime. It rather makes nonsense of your theory about innocent old rustics with straw in their hair toasting the queen. You can’t organize these things overnight, you know.” He was right, of course, and events bore him out. As the nights shook and rumbled to the crash of grenades it became clear that, despite the amateurishness of execution (there was more broken glass than anything at first), the whole thing was part of a design. Situated as trained hand. Evidence began to come in of Cypriots having received paramilitary instruction somewhere outside the island—in Greece. Rumor spoke of “phased” operations which would be directed against the police to begin with, and added under its breath the words “like Palestine.”we were at the frail center of the cobweb, we held our breaths and praised heaven for the inefficiency of these mosquito raids. They succeeded overwhelmingly in one thing, however, and that was the undermining of public morale. Here and there, too, among a hundred incidents of juvenile futility there was one which bore the pug-marks of something uglier—the
To the disorder and alarm of the night-hours were added further demonstrations and riots organized by the schools which were dealt with crisply enough—but it was obvious that the police could not work right round the clock, chasing bombardiers all night and louts all day. The field of operations, too, lent itself to these harrowing tactics, for the labyrinth of warrens in the old town could hide a veritable army of bomb-throwers—even military estimates indicated that it would take practically a Brigade to search it thoroughly in one operation. When it was cordoned off, piece by piece, malefactors could easily slip over from the Famagusta Gate to the Turkish Konak in a matter of minutes.
The public, too, always timorous and in this case deliberately sympathetic to the trouble-makers, became deaf and blind, prejudicing the course of justice by its silence—which in the end could only lead to sterner measures by which the public itself would suffer. The perversion of justice was perhaps the most serious factor from the point of view of administration; Wren found it impossible to secure convictions against people unless caught in flagrante delicto. And then, the age groups to which these youthful terrorists belonged struck us as alarming. Moreover the moral pressure exercised by Athens radio, which went into raptures at every evidence of what it described as an open insurrection, was backed up by the local clergy whose public utterances reached new heights of bloodcurdling ferocity. The legal apparatus found itself grappling with new and disturbing formulations. Repressive measures would have to be taken; in what light would they be regarded by a world press already critical of our attitude to the question?
And then the police—always the police; Wren’s calm and measured assessments had been committed to paper and sent on their way; but how could they be “implemented”—with the best will in the world? And if things got worse would they not fall short of the requirements he now thought necessary?
The nights became stretched and tense, punctuated by the sullen crack of grenades and the roar of police traffic as Wren’s forces raced to the incident in the vain hope of a capture. To the customary homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails was now added a new unpleasantness—a bomb fitted with a time-pencil: a soul-destroying weapon in its effects on the morale of peaceful civilians. These at least were not homemade.
“Freedom is acquired only by blood,” shrilled Athens radio. But whose blood? A bomb placed in a letter-box at the entrance to Nicosia Central Police Station went off while the street was still crowded with market-visitors and killed a Greek outright; sprawling among the wreckage on the sidewalk were thirteen injured Turks and Armenians. The shadow of communal reprisals grew bigger as the leader of the Turkish National Party warned the Greek community against any further out rage in the Turkish quarter. Bars, private houses, restau rants, graveyards—a bewildering succession of pointless targets came up. The military sent in supporting patrols by night now to help Wren; roadblocks and searches began to mark off familiar thoroughfares. The patient taciturn soldiery now began to stop cars and lorries on the main roads to hunt for arms.…
And as if to echo the disorders of the towns the sleeping countryside now began to wake sporadically with intimations of more serious, more considered, operations conducted by bands which were both more informed and more resolute than the juv
eniles. It became clear that there were two sorts of enemy, a vast amorphous mass of secondary schoolboys whose task was bombing and pamphleteering and supporting public disorder—and a group of mountain bandits whose task was to raid police stations, organize ambushes, and operate against the net of roads and telegraph wires which constituted the nervous system of the administration. They were dryly classified by Wren as the “Junior and Senior Leagues.” To these he was later to add a third and final category—“The Killers” which could not have numbered above twenty or thirty, to judge by the later ballistics evidence which could point to one gun, say, as having been responsible for upwards of ten street killings. But all this was buried in futurity, still covered by the deceptive mask of a perfect spring, smothered in wild flowers and rejoicing in those long hours of perfect calm which persuaded all but the satraps that the nightmare had faded. The shopping centers would be deserted for half a day after an incident; and then people would slowly creep out again, wistfully breathing in the silent air, like animals snuffing the wind; and reassured, they would start to go about the hundred trivial tasks of the day which the automatism of ordinary life had made endearing, comprehensible—containing no element of prediction. So they would open shutters, set out chairs, dust, combine, and recombine their wares in familiar patterns, or simply sighing, bend vulpine features to the loved and familiar Turkish coffee which came swinging towards them on the little pendulum-trays of the waiters. And in these same daylight hours blond and brown soldiers walked the streets, chaffing their acquaintances among the townsmen and being chaffed in return—and their wives rolled perambulators full of rosy children, about the market greeted everywhere by smiles and customary attentions. It was unreal. One has seen rabbits scatter like this at the report of a gun, only to re-emerge after half an hour and timidly come out to grass again—unaware that the hunter is still there, still watching. Civilians have no memory. Each new event comes to them on a fresh wave of time, pristine and newly delivered, with all its wonder and horror brimming with novelty. Only in dull offices with electric light burning by day the seekers sat, doggedly listing events in order to study their pattern, to relate past and present, so that like stargazers they might peer a little way into the darkening future.