ISLES OF GREECE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 32, 7 February 1941, Page 8

ISLES OF GREECE

NEW ZEALANDER'S VISIT

MOUNTAIN MEN

"I find them short men all right; mountaineers with broad chests, brown eyes, and something about them that makes me glad lam not,an Italian," is the pen-picture of Greek soldiers painted by a young Wellington airman who has been on a special mission in the Near East. Writing to his parents, this airman describes equally briefly and emphatically the beauties of Greece for which the Greeks are fighting and the horrors of air attacks on undefended villages that have no military significance.

"There will, I think, be no objection to my mentioning that I have been on Greek territory and have entirely revised my notions about that race," he wrote. He had met Greek residents in New Zealand and looked upon "the sons of Homer" (as short men who served excellent meals in restaurants.

"Late one afternoon I watched these men, peasants in uniform, wind down from the mists that shrouded their mountain villages. Occasionally the younger ones popped their rifles off into the air. More often they, sang while marching off to the embarkation point for the front. Their songs were like those sung by the Don Cossack Choir. A baritone will sing a few lines, the marching men answer a thunderous 'Choomp,' <the baritone sings some more, and then a wave of undisciplined harmony will quench his voice, tenors silvering above the rumbling bases. SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR. "They've got something to fight for and about. Their land is lovely if you have an eye for soaring mountains and the flash of white villages struggling under rocky ridges; for islands dark with the green of olive groves; for ancient monuments basking on a headland, marble white against the blue of the Mediterranean. That's what they have to fight for. "I visited a village. The air-raid alarm sounded—church bells, by the way—and sharing my ditch were two women. One was old. She had pulled a bush over'her seventy -year-old grey hairs, and, though not crying, this peasant, who had hitherto met nothing more mechanical than a well-hoist, was experiencing terror that sickened me to watch. I couldn't help feeling ashamed of my job. A week before British guns arrived an Italian bomber had plastered this village—containing nothing more deadly than a fly spray. The other woman was crying, remem-/ boring that despicable raid when she had lost a little girl, and her son in hospital. That's what these little men, and I, have got to fight about."