The Evening Star SATURDAY AUGUST 17. 1940. GREECE ON THE BRINK.

Evening Star, Issue 23657, 17 August 1940, Page 10

The Evening Star SATURDAY AUGUST 17. 1940. GREECE ON THE BRINK.

For ten years Greece has been in the happy position of the country that has no history. During the Great War her sympathies were divided, with a King who favoured the Germans and a Prime Minister who caused her to fight for the Allies. The war with Turkey which followed was disastrous for her, and its tragedy was intensified by political feuds, Venizelists against anti-Veni-zelists, Republicans against Monarchists. The Monarchists won their final triumph with the upturn of her present King, and for five years there has been political peace under the dictatorship of General Metaxas. The most different accounts have been given of his rule, but it seems to have provoked few troubles. The happiness which Greece has enjoyed has been merely relative; the Greeks as a people are poor, but theirs is a sterile sojl. Peasants and seafarers alike take their poverty for granted, and so bear it philosophically. A writer in the latest ‘ Fortnightly,’ who knows the country well and revisits it at intervals, describes the Metaxas regime as belonging to the school of Mussolini and Hitler, tempered by the Greek character. Metaxas was educated in Germany, and his pro-Germfln policy in the last war brought disaster on his sovereign. The Greeks pride themselves on their democracy, and this Dictator does not fail to take account of that strong instinct and also of past mistakes. TJie resultant compromise, we are told, in internal affairs does not work unsatisfactorily. “ Many of Metaxas’s original decrees have melted in the sun. Those regulations that the ‘ Greeks could accept without too much resentment have temained, giving a definite and welcome stability to the State.” A pro-Axis policy on Metaxas’s part would not suit Greece. Her people cannot see that Italian ambitions on the east coast of the Adriatic and in the Mediterranean generally bode them any good. The Mediterranean was their sea before ancient Rome made any claims to it—a point which Mussolini ignores in invoking ancient rights for his own advantage. Metaxas does not parade his views on international affairs. ‘‘ There can be no doubt,” says the writer we have quoted, “ that his main object will be to keep his country out of war.” Many Greeks have not sought to conceal their strong leaning to the Allies, One of them remarked to this observer: “ Why don’t the Allies come to Salonika ? We' dare not invite them; but, if they come, there would be no resistance. Besides, they would bring economic revival to Greece.” Spies, secret missions, bribery, blackmail, mysterious messages, evasive answers, undecipherable codes were described as making the atmosphere of the country, while Greece wondered whether she would bo drawn into the war or not. It has seemed this week as if Italy was resolved to push her into it, hoping to demolish this small State as she did Albania. If her bullying of the Athens Government was devised merely to distract attention from the trouble she is having among the neighbouring highlanders,' a more serious complexion threatens to be given to it by an Italian submarine’s torpedoing of a small Greek warship, with loss of life. General Metaxas is said to have rejected a suggestion from Rome that he should renounce the guarantee against aggression given to his country by Groat Britain. In the tension between Greece and Italy importance has been attached to another incident, the reported murder of an Albanian Fascist in Italian Dalmatia, because of the long-standing Italian campaign to separate Dalmatia from Yugoslavia. No one knows what an hour may bring forth in the Balkans.