I must tell them, in Angora, that England, at least, has always honestly tried to put right her own wrong-doings, and one day (may it be soon!) she will “redeem” herself to them also. Mr. H. G. Wells somewhere describes the strange, great love we often feel for those we have deeply wronged—the wife, the friend, the enemy. May it not, at the long last, be so “after the war?” Who knows if, indeed, this be not the dark hour before the dawn, of our nation’s friendships—with those we have been led to hate? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV ATHENS—“WE HAVE LOVED HELEN; MUST WE DIVORCE HER?” IF only it were always calm, how delightful it would be to travel by sea! FROM Malta to Athens, indeed, is not a long run; but when every moment you are tossed from side to side, at the mercy of all the winds in heaven, most things have a disagreeable look. As we approached the brown and arid coast of this historic peninsula, I thought how unjust it seems to have driven the Ottoman Greeks out of fertile Turkey to a fatherland that cannot feed them. You cannot obtain blood from a stone, nor fruitful crops from an unfertile soil. What is Greece to do for these poor people, who cannot all turn merchants or moneylenders? Before landing at Piræus, with my Italian escort, I took the precaution to investigate the rate of exchange—250 drachmas to the £1 sterling. “It is strange,” said I, “that we have none of this inconvenience in Turkey. There one always gets a fair ‘exchange,’ and no worry.” The steamer slows down to anchor, and on all sides we are hustled by modern Shylocks. “Two hundred and fifty drachmas for a pound,” I asked, “how many for five shillings?” And the Greek answered: “Fifteen.” “Come and listen to this Greek arithmetic,” I called in Italian; but the man understood me, and let out a hearty laugh. Though I turned from him, without malice, he promptly raised his price from fifteen to forty-five (!), and in the end I bought drachmas enough to take us ashore, hoping for better terms on land. I shall never forget that day at Piræus—heat and dust, flies and refugees. Could a more terrible combination be imagined? All along the quays lay these wretched folk, many of them fast asleep, with armies of flies crawling over them. If by chance one stumbled over a dusky body, which it was not easy to distinguish from the soil, a cloud of flies rose to smite you in the face—the most fatal of disease-carriers! The brown-faced women, dirtier even than the Neopolitans, now crowded round us, offering cakes and sweets from which they were every moment obliged to brush off thick coatings of flies, that once more struck one in the face or settled over my shoulders.