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

links with Britain, at least I tried to meld the glories of the mediaeval and the ancient civilisation into a new force. No one can ever say that I acted without regard to Greece. Greece has been my one true wife. Perhaps history will remember me as the man who forbade the reading of the funeral oration of Pericles and who alienated the peasantry by putting limits on the number of goats that ruin our forests. O God, perhaps I have been nothing but an absurd little man.
    `But I have done my best, I have done everything to prepare for this war that I still work to avoid. I have built railways and fortifications, I have called up the reserve; I have prepared the people by way of speeches, I Gave pursued diplomacy to the point of ridicule. Let history say that I was the man who did everything possible to save his native land. Everything ends in death.'
    But there was no doubt that he had been too much obsessed by an historical sense, with the idea that there was a messianic mission which had been chosen for him to fulfil. He had thought that there could have been no other man, that he was the one to take the Greek nation by the neck and drag it, kicking and expostulating, towards the rightful goal. He had felt himself a doctor who inflicts necessary pain, knowing that after the curses and protests of the patient, there would come a time when he would be crowned with the flowers of the grateful. He had always done what he knew to be right, but perhaps in the end it was vanity that had impelled him, something as simple and disgraceful as megalomania.
    But now his spirit had been cast into the fire, and he knew that his temper was being assayed in the furnace of destiny. Was he going to be the man who saved Greece? The man who could have saved Greece, but did not? The man who could not have saved Greece, but who strove with the utmost effort to save her honour? That was it; it was a question above all of personal and national honour, because the important thing was that Greece should come through this trial without the slightest imputation of turpitude. When soldiers are dead, when a country is devastated and destroyed, it is honour that survives and endures. It is honour that breathes life into the corpse when evil times have passed.
    Was it not it a form of irony to be so mocked by fate? Had he not selected for himself his role as `The First Peasant', `The First Worker', `The National Father'? Had he not surrounded himself with the pompous trappings of a modern Fascist? A Regime of the Fourth Of August 1936'? A Third Hellenic Civilisation to echo Hitler's Third Reich? A National Youth Organisation that held parades, waved banners, just like the Hitler Youth? Didn't he despise Liberals, Communists, and Parliamentarianism, just as did Franco, Salazar, Hitler, and Mussolini? Hadn't he sowed discord amongst the leftists, according to the textbook? What could have been easier, given their ludicrous factionalism and their eagerness to betray each other on the grounds of false consciousness and any one of a plethora of ideological impurities? Didn't he denounce the plutocracy? Didn't the secret police know the exact aroma and chemical composition of every subversive fart in Greece? So why had his international brothers deserted him? Why did Ribbentrop send him anodyne assurances that could not be believed? Why was Mussolini fabricating border incidents and diplomatic impasses? What had gone wrong? How had it occurred that he had risen to such heights by catching the currents of the times, only to find himself confronted by the greatest crisis in the modern history of the fatherland, a crisis engineered by the very people whom he had taken as his exemplars and mentors? Wasn't it an irony that nowadays he could rely only upon the British - the Parliamentarian, Liberal, democratic, plutocratic British? Prime Minister Metaxas wrote down on a piece of paper the differences between himself and the others. He was not a racist. That's not much.