Captain Corelli's mandolin by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online Page A

floodlights conspired to exacerbate his sensation of having become a prisoner behind his own iron gates; he had fulfilled the requirements of classical tragedy by creating the circumstances of his own entrapment. All Greece had shrunk to this modest pseudo-Byzantine villa and its bourgeois furniture, for the very simple reason that he held the fate and the honour of his beloved country in the palm of his hand. He looked down at his hands and reflected that they were small, like himself. He wished briefly that he had chosen to retire on a colonel's pension and live quietly in some anonymous corner, a place in which to live and die blamelessly.
    Dying had much preoccupied him recently, for he had realised that his body was failing him. It was nothing specific, there was no catalogue of tell-tale symptoms, it was merely that he felt exhausted enough to die. He knew that a kind of detached and passive grief overtakes those on the threshold of death, a resigned composure, and it was this detachment and composure which was rising up in him at the same time as circumstances were obliging him to summon up a strength, purpose, and nobility such as he had never required before. Sometimes he wanted to pass the reins of state to other hands, but he knew that fate had selected him as protagonist in the tragedy and that he had no choice but to grip the hilt of the sword and draw it. `There are so many things I should have done,' he thought, and suddenly it was borne in upon him that life could have been sweet if only he had known thirty years ago what the results of the donors' analyses would be at this far-distant point of the future that had rolled slowly but maliciously towards him and become the inescapable, arduous, and insupportable present. `If I had lived my life in the consciousness of this death, everything would have been different.'
    He cast his mind back over the impossible vicissitudes of his career, and wondered whether history would show him any charity. It had been a long journey from the Prussian Military Academy in Berlin; it seemed that it must have been in another life that he had learned to admire the teutonic sense of order, discipline, and seriousness, the very qualities that he had tried to instil in his native land. He had even commissioned the very first grammar of the demotic tongue and made it compulsory in schools, because of the theory that learning grammar promotes logicality and would therefore curb the wild, irresponsible individualism of the Greeks.
    He recalled the fiasco of the Great War, when Venizelos had wanted to join the Allies and the King had wanted to remain neutral. How he had argued that Bulgaria would take the opportunity to invade if Greece were to join in; how nobly he had resigned his post as Chief-of-Staff, how nobly he had accepted exile. Better forget the attempted coup in 1923. And now it looked as though Bulgaria might invade indeed, grasping the opportunities granted this time by Italy in its attempts to fill the vacuum left by the Turks.
    He remembered his defeat of the striking tobacco workers in Salonica; twelve dead. On the strength of that disorder he had persuaded the King to suspend the constitution in order to thwart the Communists; he had persuaded the King to appoint him Prime Minister even though he was the leader of the most marginal right-wing party in the country. But why had he done it? `Metaxa',' he said to himself, `history will say that it was opportunism, that you could not succeed by democratic means. There will be no one near to say the truth on my behalf, which is that there was a slump and that our democracy was too effeminate to cope with it. It is easy to say what should have been, harder to acknowledge the inexorable force of necessity. I was the embodiment of necessity, that's all. If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else. At least I didn't allow the Germans any influence, though God knows they nearly got the economy. At least I kept up the