There ensued an exchange of prisoners, and the retreat of the Allies to their ships during the night, followed next day by the detachment quartered at the Zappeion, and all the controllers of police, posts, telegraphs, telephones, and railways. Many of the ruffians in the pay of the Franco-British Secret Services anticipated this evacuation by slipping out of the capital which they had terrorized for nearly a year. And so the pacific demonstration was over, having cost the Greeks 4 officers and 26 men killed, and 4 officers and 51 men wounded. The Allied casualties were 60 killed, including 6 officers, and 167 wounded. For the rest, no epithet was less applicable to the affair than that of "Athenian Vespers," with which the Parisian press christened it. Admiral Dartige protests indignantly against the grotesque exaggerations of his imaginative compatriots. Apart from the tragic features natural to a pacific demonstration, he declares that the whole drama passed off as pleasantly as a drama could. Not a single Allied subject was ill-treated. Not one shot was fired on the Legations of the Entente Powers, whose Ministers and nationals, in the midst of it all, incurred only such danger as came from their own shells--shells showered upon an open town. Even the French bluejackets, who had long been a thorn in the very heart of Athens, were conducted back to their proper place under a Greek escort, ingloriously {161} but safely. A like spirit, to a still higher degree, marked the treatment in Greek hospitals of the Allies' wounded, whose rapid recovery, says the Admiral, testified to the care which they received. "We assisted in a civil war: the Royalists struck in our marines the protectors of their political enemies." [18]