THE ARCHISTRATEGOS
Missolonghi had become the center of European attention. The
announcement of the English Committee which followed Blaquiere’s return
to England was on every tongue.
The _Courier_ had printed a single sneering paragraph in which had
been compressed the rancor of William Godwin, the bookseller. This
stated that George Gordon was not even in Greece, that he was in
reality living in a sumptuous villa on one of the Ionian Islands, with
the Contessa Guiccioli, writing a companion poem to “Don Juan.” But
before the stringent disapproval with which this bald fabrication was
received, the _Courier_ slunk to shamefaced silence.
Thereafter, in the columns of newspaper, pamphlet and magazine, there
was to be distinguished a curious tension of reserve. It was the
journalistic obeisance to a growing subterranean yet potent revulsion
of feeling. Dallas had soon found himself the recipient of invitations
from influential hosts desirous to hear of his visit to Italy. In the
clubs the committee’s bulletins were eagerly discussed. The loan it
solicited found subscriptions and the struggle of the Cross with the
Crescent--the cause whose beating heart was now Missolonghi--began
to draw the eyes not of London but of England; not of England but of
Europe; not of Europe but of the world.
To the company gathered in the citadel of this little marshy port on
the Greek sea-shallows, where freedom stirred in the womb of war,
outer comment came only after multiplied reverberations. They toiled
ceaselessly--a nucleus of hard-working general officers culled from
everywhere--planning, drilling, gathering stores, preparing for the
inevitable attack of the Turkish armies massing at Lepanto, trying
to knit into organization the tawdry elements of brigandage to
which centuries of Turkish subjection had reduced a great nation.
They labored under a single far-sighted leadership: that of the
_archistrategos_ of the Greek forces, whose eye seemed sleepless and
his brain indefatigable.
Gordon foresaw that Greece’s greatest enemy was not the Turks, but her
own dissensions. Unification of spirit and authority was necessary
before all. When Ulysses, the recalcitrant, sent him an obsequious
embassy it bore back a terse answer: “I come to aid a nation, not a
faction.” Ulysses cursed in his beard and sent Trevanion, for whom
he had found more than one cunning use, to seduce the Suliote forces
camped within the insurgent lines.
Meanwhile, the money Gordon had brought melted rapidly. He had
contributed four hundred pounds a week for rations alone, besides
supporting batteries, laboratories and an entire brigade, settling
arrears and paying for fortification. However large his private
resources, they must soon be exhausted. Could the English loan fail?
And if not, would it come in time? If it was too long delayed,
disaster must follow. Discipline would lapse. The diverse elements on
the point of coalescing, would fly asunder. The issue would be lost.
This thought was a live coal to him night and day.
The rainy season set in with all its rigors. Missolonghi became a
pestilential mud-basket beside which the dikes of Holland were a
desert of Arabia for dryness. An unknown plague fastened on the bazaar
and terrified the townspeople. But in all conditions, Gordon seemed
inspirited with a calm cheerfulness.
He thought of Teresa continually. Oddly enough, she stood before him
always as he had once seen her on a square in Venice, with moonlight
tangling an aureole in her gold hair, her face now not frozen with
mute horror--that picture had vanished forever!--but serene with
love and abnegation. This face lighted the page as he labored with
his correspondence. It went with him on the drenching beach when he
directed the landing of cannon sent by the German committee--more dimly
seen this day, for a peculiar dizziness and lethargy which he had
battled for a fortnight, was upon him.
As he rode back through the rain and the bottomless quagmire, Prince
Mavrocordato and Pietro Gamba sat waiting in his room at headquarters.
They had been talking earnestly. The outlook was leaden. There had
been as yet no news of the expected loan. The lustful eyes of foreign
ministers were watching. Ulysses had seized the acropolis of Athens,
and his agents were everywhere, seeking to undermine the provisional
government. The Suliotes, whose chiefs swarmed in Missolonghi, had
begun to demand money and preferment.
But these things, serious as they were, weighed less heavily upon
Prince Mavrocordato’s mind than the health of the man he now awaited in
that cheerless chamber.
“Another post would do as well,” the Greek said gloomily. “Higher
ground, out of the marshes. He stays here only at risk to himself. Yet
he will listen to no proposal of removal.”
“What does he say?” asked Gamba.
“That Missolonghi is the center of Western Greece, the focus-point of
European observation. And he ends all discussion by the question: ‘If I
abandoned this castle to the Turks, what would the partizans of Ulysses
say?’”
Gamba was silent. Mavrocordato knit his bushy brows. He knew the answer
only too well. And yet the safety of this single individual had come to
mean everything. Without him Greece’s organization would be chaos, its
armies, rabbles.
While he pondered, Gordon entered. He had thrown off his wet clothing
below. The shepherd-dog crouched by the door, sprang up with a joyful
whine as the new-comer dropped a hand on his head.
Pietro had a sudden vision of his sister as she placed upon him her
last injunction--to guard this man’s life. He had done all he could.
Yet to what avail? Watchfulness might ward steel and lead, but what
could combat the unflagging toil, the hourly exposure, the stern denial
of creature comfort? His eyes wandered around the damp walls hung with
swords, carbines and pistols, to the rough mattress at one side, the
spare meal laid waiting the occupant’s hasty leisure. In his mind ran
the words with which Gordon had replied to one of his protests: “Here
is a stake worth millions such as I am. While I can stand at all, I
must stand here.” Gamba’s thought returned to what the prince was
saying:
“Allow me at least to furnish this chamber for your lordship. A bed--”
“Our Suliotes spread their mats on the ground,” was the reply, “or on
the dirt floor of their miserable huts. I am better couched than they.”
“They are used to it,” protested the Greek. “They have never known
better. They are proof against marsh fever, too.” He paused an instant,
then added: “I have just learned that the wines I have ordered sent
you, have on each occasion been returned to the commissariat.”
Gordon’s gaze had followed the other’s. The food spread there was of
the meanest: goat’s meat, coarse peasant’s bread, a pitcher of sour
cider. He was fighting back a vertigo that had been misting his eyes.
“My table costs me exactly forty-five _paras_. That is the allowance
of each Greek soldier. I shall live as they live, Prince, no worse, no
better.”
His voice broke off. He reeled. Mavrocordato sprang and threw an arm
about him. Pietro hastened to send Fletcher to the improvised hospital
for the physicians.
They came hastily, to find Gordon in a convulsion of fearful strength,
though it lasted but a moment. Leeches were put to his temples and
consciousness returned. He opened his eyes upon an anxious group of
surgeons and staff-officers.
A commotion arose at the instant from the courtyard. Mavrocordato
stepped to the window. He made an exclamation. The place was filling
with Suliotes--they were dragging its two cannon from their stations
and turning their muzzles against the doors.
An orderly burst into the room. “They are seizing the arsenal!” he
cried.
With an oath a Swedish officer leaped down the stair, drawing his sword
as he ran. He fell stunned by the blow of a musket-butt.
Wild figures, their faces and splendid attire splashed with mud, gushed
in, choked the stairway, and poured into the narrow apartment--to waver
and halt abruptly, abashed.
This was not what Trevanion had craftily told them of--not the abode
of soft luxury and gem-hung magnificence affected by the foreign
_archistrategos_ whose wealth was limitless and who sipped wines of
liquid pearls, while they, their payments in arrears, drank sharp
raisin-juice. What they saw was at strange variance with this picture.
A chill stone chamber, a meager repast, uncarpeted floors. A handful
of men, each with a drawn sword. These--and a form stretched on a
rough mattress, an ensanguined bandage about his forehead, a single
gray-haired servant kneeling by his side.
The man on the couch rose totteringly, his hand on his servant’s
shoulder. He was ghastly white, but his eye flashed and burned as it
turned on those semi-barbaric invaders.
Gordon began to speak--not in the broader Romaic, but in their own
mountain _patois_, a tongue he had not recalled since long years. The
uncouth vocabulary, learned in his youthful adventurous journey for
very lack of mental pabulum, had lain in some brain-corner to spring
up now with the spontaneity of inspiration. At the first words they
started, looked from one to another, their hands dropped from their
weapons. His voice proceeded, gathering steel, holding them like
bayonets.
“Am I then to abandon your land to its enemies, because of you, heads
of clans, warriors born with arms in your hands, because you yourselves
bring all effort to naught? For what do you look? Is it gold? The
money I brought has purchased cannon and ammunition. It has furnished
a fleet. It has cared for your sick and set rations before your men.
Do you demand preferment? You are already chiefs, by birth and by
election. Have I taken that away? Rank shall be yours--but do you hope
to earn it idly in camp, or fighting as your fathers fought, like your
own Botzaris, who fell for his country? Is it for yourselves you ask
these things now, or is it for Greece?”
Of the staff-officers there gathered none knew the tongue in which
he spoke. But they could guess what he was saying. They saw the rude
chieftains cower before his challenge. Then, as he went on, under that
magnetic gaze they saw the savage brows lighten, the fierce eyes soften
and fall.
Gordon’s tone had lost its lash. His words dropped gently. He was
speaking of those old days when he had slept beneath a Suliote tent and
written songs of the freedom for which they now strove. The handful
beside him had put up their swords. For a moment not only individual
lives, but the fate of Greece itself had hung in the balance. They
watched with curious intentness.
As the speaker paused, a burly chieftain, built like a tower, thrust
up his hand and turned to the rest, speaking rapidly and with many
gesticulations. He pointed to the rough couch, to the coarse fare on
the table. The others answered with guttural ejaculations.
All at once he bared his breast, slashed it with his dagger, and
touched knee to ground before Gordon’s feet. The rest followed his
example. Each as he rose, saluted and passed out. Before a dozen had
knelt, the rumble of wheels in the courtyard announced that the cannon
were being dragged back to their places.
The last Suliote chief retired and Gordon’s hand fell from Fletcher’s
shoulder. The headquarters’ surgeon broke the tension:
“His lordship must have quiet!” he warned.
The whiteness had been growing upon Gordon’s face. As the officers
retired, he sank back upon the couch. Mavrocordato held brandy to his
lips, but he shook his head.
He lay very still for a while, his eyes closed, hearing the murmuring
voices of the prince and Gamba as they stood with the physicians,
feeling on the mattress a shaking hand that he knew was Fletcher’s.
A harrowing fear was upon him. The mutiny that had been imminent this
hour he had vanquished; he might not succeed again. With resources
all might be possible, but his own funds were stretched to the last
para. And the English loan still hung fire. If he but had the proceeds
of a single property--of Rochdale, which he had turned over to the
committee in London--he could await the aid which must eventually come.
Lacking both, he faced inaction, failure; and now to cap all, illness
threatened him. He almost groaned aloud. Greece must not fail!
There was but one way--to fight and fight soon. Instead of waiting
till famine made ally with the enemy, to attack first. To throw his
forces, though undisciplined, upon the Turks. Victory would inspirit
the friends of the revolution. It would knit closer every segment. It
would hasten the loan in England. Might the assault be repelled? No
worse, even so, than a defeat without a blow--the shame of a cowardly
disintegration!
“Prince--” Gordon summoned all his strength and sat up. “May I ask
you to notify my staff-officers to meet me here in an hour? We shall
discuss a plan of immediate attack upon Lepanto.”