Читать книгу Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny - David Crane - Страница 8
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Оглавление‘And without ties – wearied and wretched – melancholy and dissatisfied – what was left me here? – I have been dying piecemeal – thin – careworn – and desponding – Such an excitement as this was necessary to rouse me into energy and life – and it has done so – I am all on fire for action – and ready to endure the worst that may befall, seeking nothing but honour.’
Trelawny to Claire Clairmont 22 July 1823 1
TEN DAYS AFTER THE Hercules anchored off the port of Argostoli, a small group from the ship lay picnicking beside the Fountain of Arethusa on the Homeric isle of Ithaca. Beneath them the water from the spring tumbled away into a dark ravine. ‘The view,’ Hamilton Browne, the young Philhellene who had joined them at Leghorn, recalled ten years later,
embracing the vast sea-prospect, the Aechirades, the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, or Lepanto, with the distant purple mountains of Epirus and Aetolia, lifting their lofty peaks into the clouds, was superb; and ascending the hill at the back of the cavern, Santa Maura, the ancient Leucadia, with its dependencies, was distinctly descried, together with Cephalonia, apparently close at hand; Zante, and the coast of the Peloponessus, trending far away to the southeast. A more lovely situation could scarcely be imagined.2
It would be difficult also to imagine a view more completely at odds with reality. If one could have followed Browne’s panoramic sweep across the map of western and southern Greece, only seen it shorn of that seductive allure which distance and classical associations gave it for him – if one could have extended that view further, beyond the ruined city of Tripolis to Nauplia and Argos in the east, and beyond those again as far northwards as Salonica or south to Crete and Cyprus: or, again, if one shortened that perspective, to take in the emaciated figures crowding the little port of Vathi hidden at the picnickers’ feet, refugees from the ruins of Patras and the horrors of Chios, then wherever one looked the wasted faces of survivors or the whitening bones which littered the Greek landscape in their thousands would all have told the same story of a war of unimaginable brutality.
The conflict that had so devastated Greece had begun just over two years earlier in the spring of 1821. On 6 March, a Russian general of Greek extraction had crossed the River Pruth from Bessarabia into what is now modern Romania, raised his banner of the phoenix and called on the Christian populations of the Ottoman empire to throw off their oppressors.
Political realism has never been a feature of modern Greek history but, even by the extravagances of the last century and a half, Moldavia was a curious place to start a revolution. For almost four hundred years the Trans-Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia had suffered the heavy burden of Ottoman rule, and yet at the end of all that time, if there was a single sentiment beyond a hatred of the Turks that might have united its disparate peoples, it was a loathing of the Greek that ran almost as deep. For nearly four centuries Greeks had worked within the Ottoman Empire as assiduously as they had within its Roman predecessor, their women stocking its harems and their children its armies, their merchants, sailors, translators and administrators garnering to themselves those tasks and powers that seemed below Moslem dignity, and their great Constantinople families – the Greeks of the Phanar on the southern shore of the Golden Horn – sending out generation after generation to govern in the Danubian provinces with a greed that comfortably eclipsed that of their masters.*
It was one of the great tragedies of the War of Independence that the melancholy condition of Greece itself meant that its leadership inevitably fell to these Greeks of the Phanar and the scattered communities which made up the world of the Greek diaspora. Since the last, magical flowering of Byzantine culture at Mystra in the fifteenth century the geographical area of Modern Greece had declined into a state of impoverished misery, an almost forgotten backwater of Ottoman Europe, its traditions of freedom wilted to the bandit culture of the mountain klephts and all memory of its unique artistic and political inheritance buried under centuries of oppression.
It was from the West that this memory, so vital and so hazardous to the regeneration of the country, was re-imported into Greece, but it was crucially among the educated communities of the diaspora that the first Greek converts were made. Throughout the eighteenth century, these colonies had grown and prospered in capitals and ports from Marseilles to Calcutta, and as this new pride in their ancient past seeped into their consciousness, western Hellenism underwent a crucial seachange that took it out of the study and into the realm of political ambition.
The result was a volatile and dangerous new faith which owed as much to the trading and cultural links of these colonies with the Phanariot world of Constantinople as it did to the architectural purism of Stuart and Revett. In the journals and paintings of European travellers and scholars, eighteenth-century Philhellenism largely remained an innocuous and literary phenomenon, but as it made its way back to the Greek communities of the Black Sea and southern Russia it became a heady mix of Hellenistic posturing and Byzantine nostalgia, of alien political theory and grandiose ambition that looked to Constantinople – simply but eloquently the ‘polis’ – as the centre of a new-born Greece.
With the spread of the ideas and language of revolution after 1789 and the increased trade of the Napoleonic years, these aspirations gained a momentum that not even the Congress of Vienna could halt. By 1820, revolution to most Greeks within and without the Ottoman Empire seemed inevitable. For the previous five years a secret society called the Philike Hetairia had been at work, proselytizing and fund raising within the thriving Greek communities of Europe and Russia, and recruiting among the clergy and leaders of the Peloponnese and Northern Greece.
In 1820, a year of revolution across Europe, with rebellions in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and crucially, Ali Pasha’s in Albania, the moment seemed at hand. Through the winter the Apostles of the Philike Hetairia moved through the islands and mainland of Greece, spreading the word from initiate to initiate to prepare for war. Secrecy was virtually abandoned, so certain was everyone of the approaching rebellion, so rightly confident of Turkish indolence. In the Peloponnese, Germanos, the Bishop of Patras, and Petro Bey Mavromichaelis, head of the Maniots in the southern mountains of ancient Sparta, made ready. From the Ionian Isles, the great bandit leader, Theodore Colocotrones, slipped back from exile onto the mainland, drawn by the irresistible lure of patriotism and plunder; and in a town in southern Russia, the committee of merchants who were the sole reality behind the Philike Hetairia’s shadowy ‘Grand Arch’ appointed Alexander Ypsilanti to its supreme command.
Perhaps nothing so typifies the limitations of the Hetairists as that choice, because if Moldavia was an improbable place to begin a Greek revolution then Alexander Ypsilanti was an even more unlikely candidate for leader. A major general in the Russian army and the son of a Moldavian Greek hospadar or prince, Ypsilanti seems to have brought little to his task beyond the arrogance of the court and the morals of an autocracy, his single, dubious qualification for command being an arm lost in battle.
Within days of crossing the Pruth and beginning his leisurely march south, the ‘steward of the stewards of the August Arch,’ as he styled himself in a piece of characteristic masonic flummery, had succeeded only in alienating the Christian population he had come to redeem. By June the revolution in the Danubian provinces was over before it had ever really begun, disowned by the Tsar and riven by jealousies, a casualty of the indecision and moral cowardice of its leader and the sheer fatuity of Greek ambitions.
Ypsilanti’s campaign and his own subsequent flight into Austria rank among the most disgraceful episodes of the whole war, and yet while the insurrection had failed in the Danubian provinces, it had taken hold in Greece itself. It had seemed inconceivable to conspirators there that the Philike Hetairia could enter Moldavia without the tacit support of the Tsar, and as they took stock of an Ottoman Empire frustrated from within by the conservatism of its military and religious leadership, threatened on its borders by their Russian co-religionists, its authority in Africa no more than nominal and its forces engaged in a war against its most powerful vassal in Albania, the expectations raised by the Society generated their own self-fulfilling momentum.
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ Wordsworth had once believed of the French Revolution, and few of Europe’s Philhellenes who now saluted the Greek insurrection in the same vein can have had any idea of the forces they had unleashed. For centuries Greek and Turk had lived together in close proximity and when fighting burst out in 1821 it was not between army and army, but between community and community, atrocity met by atrocity and massacre by massacre in a frenzy of racial and religious hatred that convulsed the whole of the Greek world.
Within months of Germanos declaring a Holy War at Ayia Lavra, twenty thousand Turks had disappeared in the Peloponnese, as Monemvassia, Navarino, Tripolis, and eventually Nauplia fell into Greek hands. On the island of Chios, eighteen thousand Greeks were slaughtered in a matter of days. At Athens, Constantinople, Nicosia, Smyrna, Saloniki, on Rhodes and Cos, Greek butchered Turk and Turk Greek until, finally, when ancient hatreds had been glutted, when there were no more Turks to burn, rape, baptize and slaughter in the Peloponnese, and no more Greeks to circumcise and kill on Chios; when two thousand women and children had been stripped and butchered in a pass outside Tripolis, and the eighty-year-old patriarch hanged outside his cathedral in Constantinople, the war settled down into a more conventional shape.*
There are few conflicts before this century which so insistently demand to be remembered in terms of human misery, but if it is these horrors of 1821 that have left their most vivid mark on the national psyches of Greece and Turkey, it was the events of the next year that determined whether revolt would ever blossom into a full-scale war for independence. During the first months of rebellion Ottoman armies had been too busy with Ali Pasha of Ionnanina to deal with a second uprising as well, but with Ali’s murder on 5 February 1822 Sultan Mahmoud II, a ruler of slow and inexorable purpose, was at last free to turn his full attention to Greece itself.
The Ottoman plan was simple, and was embarked on with a characteristic confidence that took no account of terrain, season or opposition. From his base at Larissa in northern Greece the overall commander in Roumeli, Khurshid Pasha, sent two armies southwards down the western and eastern sides of the country, the first towards Misssolonghi and the other under the command of Dramali Pasha across the Isthmus of Corinth and into the Peloponnese and the heartland of the revolt.
With 23,000 men and 60,000 horses, Dramali’s army was the greatest to enter Greece in over a hundred years. Sweeping virtually unchallenged across the isthmus in July 1822, the Turks pushed down as far as Argos only to be reduced within a month by disease, privation, incompetence and unripened fruit to a dangerous and humiliating retreat through the unsecured mountain passes south of Corinth.
This retreat of Dramali’s weakened army gave the Greeks their greatest opportunity of the war in a terrain for which history, temperament and necessity had left them supremely well equipped. To the disgust of every foreigner reared on western tactics, their irregulars could never be made to stand up to Turkish cavalry in open conflict, but here among the crags and narrow mountain paths of Dervenakia it was another story, with those guerrilla skills honed by generations of brigand klephts coming spectacularly into their own.
With the Ottoman army trapped ‘like a herd of bisons’3 in the narrow passes, flight or defiance equally useless, Dervenakia was less a battle than a massacre. If the Greeks had not been more interested in plunder than killing, the slaughter would have been still worse, but even so five thousand Turks were killed and the army which had been sent to bring back ‘the ashes of the Peloponnese’ effectively destroyed. Ravaged by disease and hunger the remnant began their retreat along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth towards Patras, reduced first to horseflesh and then cannibalism, fighting among themselves over the graves of their comrades, burying their dead in the mornings only to dig them up again at night in a gruesome bid to ward off starvation.
Dervenakia gave the Greek army its most decisive victory of the whole war but just as important in its way was the campaign fought at the same time in western Greece. The army that had slaughtered the Turks in the passes of the north-east Peloponnese had fought under the most experienced of brigand chiefs in Theodore Colocotrones, but the force raised to face the Ottoman threat to Missolonghi was entrusted to the leadership of a newly arrived Phanariot aristocrat, Alexander Mavrocordato, a man for all his other talents without any experience of warfare and little enough of Greece itself.
The details of the campaign which followed belong properly to the military history of the rebellion, but the political and psychological impact of Mavrocordato’s failure are too important to ignore. The first task of this force was to relieve the Christian Suliote tribes of Epirus on the Turkish army’s right flank, and with this in mind Mavrocordato marched north from Missolonghi towards Arta with an army of a little over two thousand men, including in its ranks about one hundred Philhellene volunteers who had come out in the first months of the uprising.
The absurd vanity of many of these Philhellenes and the ingratitude of the Greeks they had come to save had already strained relations in Mavrocordato’s camp, and the first pitched battle they fought together confirmed the prejudices of both sides. Establishing his own headquarters at Langada on the eastern shore of the Ambracian Gulf, Mavrocordato pushed his army forward under the command of General Normann, his Chief of Staff. Advancing as far as Peta, a small village in the low hills to the east of the Turkish held town of Arta, Normann’s army prepared to face the enemy in a battle which could lose them everything and win them very little. In the van were their regular troops, comprising the Philhellene corps, and two battalions of Ionian volunteers and Greek soldiers. Behind them, holding the high ground and guarding their right flank, was a force of Greek irregulars led by an old and cynical bandit chief of dubious loyalty, Gogos.
Against the vastly superior force of infantry and cavalry that issued from Arta, the regulars held firm, their discipline and firepower repulsing the first Turkish assault without casualties. For the next two hours the battle seemed still to go their way, but while the Turkish commander, Reshid Pasha, kept up a desultory frontal attack on this force, a large contingent of his Albanian soldiers was marching in a flanking movement to the north in a bid to turn the Greek position.
With a strong body of Greek irregulars commanding the high ground, this should have been impossible, and the first that the Philhellenes knew of their fate was when they saw the Ottoman standard planted on the highest hill behind them. Gogos, in league with the enemy, had fled. The regulars were now hopelessly surrounded. Leading the cavalry himself, Reshid stormed their position, capturing their two pieces of artillery. Only twenty-five of the volunteers managed to force a way at bayonet point through the Turkish fines. The rest, fighting heroically to the end, redeemed every Philhellene folly by their courage, dying where they stood, or more horribly, on the walls of Arta.
The failure of Reshid to follow up his victory by taking Missolonghi limited the short-term significance of this campaign, but the strategic consequences of Peta reverberated dangerously on through the rest of the war. From the first tactless intrusion of Philhellene volunteers there had been an innate prejudice among Greeks against western methods of warfare, and with the contrasting evidence of Peta and Dervenakia at their disposal that breezy sense of superiority which is never far below the surface of the Greek national character hardened into an arrogance that would have fatal consequences.
For the time being, however, the rebellion was safe. With the defeat of Dramali’s army in the east and the withdrawal of Reshid in the west, Turkish initiative and energy were exhausted. Their troops still held on to Patras at the western end of the Gulf and to Modon and Coron – the old ‘Eyes of Venice’ – in the south-west. Up in the north, Greek resistance, isolated and exposed, had all but collapsed. In Attica, though, the former pupil of Ali Pasha, Odysseus Androutses, held Athens. In western Greece the heroism of Missolonghi had saved the town for even greater fame. At sea Ottoman and Greek fleets seemed as bent on avoiding each other as anything else. And in the Peloponnese – or the Morea as it was more usually known – the original heartland of the revolution, the Greeks did what Greeks have always done best when freed of external threat, and turned on one other.
Even through the dangers and triumphs of 1821–2, the divisions among the Greek leaders were never far below the surface, and by the middle of 1823 the country was sliding inexorably towards civil war. To the enthusiastic Philhellenes of Europe and America, it might seem that Greece had found itself the heirs to Demosthenes and Epaminondas, and yet even after a National Constitution and Government were established at Epidaurus on 13 January, with an executive and legislature and all the trappings of modern statehood, real power remained in the hands of local factions bent on turning the rebellion to their own narrow profit.
The politics of revolutionary Greece were so riddled by family and regional loyalties and feuds that no coherent picture is possible, but there were four main factions that dominated this struggle for power: the military capitani who won the first battles of the conflict; the great island families, grown powerful on the rich pickings of the Napoleonic War, who controlled the Greek fleets; the landlords or ‘primates’ of the Morea who had exercised such influence under the Turks; and the educated Phanariots and Greeks of the diaspora who had flooded in at the beginning of the revolution.
The social and economic realities which lay behind these divisions were real enough to hold serious consequences for the future of Greece, but to most foreigners and natives allegiances were more a matter of personalities than politics. In Athens, Odysseus Androutses governed eastern Greece with an Ali Pasha-like selfishness which made him a law to himself, but in western Greece and the Morea all those antagonisms that the successes of 1822 had exposed, the divisions between civilian and military, between constitutionalist and brigand, between Phanariot and native Greek, embodied themselves most vividly in the destructive rivalry of the two men who had presided over disaster and triumph at Peta and Dervenakia, Alexander Mavrocordato and Theodore Colocotrones.
It would be difficult to imagine two leaders more opposed in their backgrounds, aspirations or personalities. A descendant of the great Phanariot families that had governed in the Danubian provinces through the eighteenth century, ‘Prince’ Alexander Mavrocordato as he was styled, was living in impoverished exile in Italy – and teaching Mary Shelley Greek – when the rebellion broke out in the spring of 1821.
Among the first volunteers to sail from Marseilles to join the cause, Mavrocordato was perhaps its only leader who not only spoke but understood the languages and the ‘language’ of European diplomacy and Philhellenism. Among the native commanders of the rebellion Colocotrones or Petro Bey might invoke the shade of Epominandas or the principles of the nation state when it suited their purposes, but their Hellenism and liberalism were the thinnest of veneers on a narrow feudalism which had nothing in common with the modern and centralized Greece of which Mavrocordato dreamed at Epidaurus.
It is perhaps perverse to dismiss the career of the first President of Modern Greece as a failure, but because of this fundamental difference of vision Mavrocordato was never as successful a leader as his talents and meteoric rise had seemed to promise. At the first congress of 1821 he had been elected to the Presidency of the Assembly and then the country, and yet even in this moment of triumph, the determination of the old primates and captains to hold on to power guaranteed that while the Constitution might be written in his image Greece would still be run in theirs.
With the military failure of Mavrocordato at Peta any last hope of a stable and powerful central government was dealt a fatal blow, but the fact is that with his western frock coat, spectacles and principles he was always going to be at a disadvantage in a country locked in a ruthless and savage war. To the Greeks who had fought at Tripolis and Dervenakia there was inevitably something alien in his western skills, and it is a sobering feet about the way Greece still sees its revolution that while there is only one statue in the whole country to the most civilized of its leaders, it is difficult to find anywhere – from Tripolis to the old Parliament building in Athens – where the hawk-like features of Theodore Colocotrones do not glower down from under a ‘classical’ helmet on a nation only too happy to sacrifice political integrity to glamour.*
Avaricious and violent, corrupt, bold, cynical and charismatic, the fifty-year-old Colocotrones was everything as a military leader that the cosmopolitan and haplessly civilian Mavrocordato could never be. ‘It would be impossible for a painter or novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain,’ the Philhellene soldier and great historian of the war, Thomas Gordon, wrote of Colocotrones,
tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers, he seemed born to command, having just the manners and bearing calculated to gain their confidence.4
Along with this air of authority, with the physical strength and presence so essential to any klepht leader, went a history to match. Born under a tree in the hills of Messenia on the Easter Monday of 1771, Colocotrones came from a long line of Turk-haters who had slid between policing the mountains as armatoles and living off them as bandits in the central Morea.
It was always his proud boast that in four hundred years of occupation his family had never once succumbed to Ottoman rule, and at the age of only fifteen Colocotrones himself fell naturally into the brigand life which had already killed his father and thirty-three of his nearest kin.
After twenty years of indiscriminate banditry against Greek and Turk alike, he was forced into exile in the Ionian Isles, but when the revolution broke out in 1821 he was ready again to resume his old life with a new and expanded brief. Present at the fell of Kalamata in the first days of the uprising, his influence and guerrilla talents soon gained him command of the troops besieging Tripolis, and victory there and at Dervenakia the following year gave him the plunder and prestige to make him the most powerful man in the Morea.
It was a position he exploited entirely for his own ends. He was not interested in the fate or even the idea of a Greece beyond the Peloponnese. To Colocotrones the war was about wealth and power, not about nationhood or any of the other battle cries of Philhellenism. In April 1823 he used the threat of his soldiers to have himself and Petro Bey elected to the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but it was a gesture of contempt for the position Mavrocordato had once held and not an endorsement of the political process. His authority, like his vision, was that of a chieftain, and by the middle of the year the rump of the government that he had usurped had fled from his vengeance to the safety and irrelevance of the islands.
It was this political situation, with the two-year-old nation only weeks from civil war, with feudal warlords in control of their private fiefdoms in the Morea and eastern Greece, with western Greece in chaos, the government in exile and Mavrocordato fled for his life to the island of Hydra, which greeted Byron when he landed at Argostoli.
From on board the Hercules he had pointed out the distant coastline of the Morea with all the excitement of a man reliving his youth, but it was not long before the reality that lay behind the shimmering image was brought rudely home. ‘The instinct that enables the vulture to detect carrion from far off,’ Trelawny wrote of their arrival, ‘is surpassed by the marvellous acuteness of the Greeks in scenting money.
The morning after our arrival a flock of Zuliote refugees alighted on our decks, attracted by Byron’s dollars. Lega, the steward, a thorough miser, coiled himself on the money-chest like a viper. Our sturdy skipper was for driving them overboard with hand-spikes. Byron came on deck in exuberant spirits, pleased with their savage aspect and wild attire, and, as was his wont, promised a great deal more than he should have done.5
In the months ahead Byron would have to pay for the caprice that made him take on these Suliots as a bodyguard, but it was the wider chaos of Greece that was soon engrossing his attention. From the moment that he went ashore at Argostoli on 3 September 1823, the struggle among the Greek factions for his money and support began. ‘No stranger,’ the young Philhellene George Finlay,* who was on Cephalonia at this time, recalled, ‘estimated the character of the Greeks more correctly than Lord Byron …’
It may, however, be observed that to nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and self-deceit so candidly. Almost every distinguished statesman and general sent him letters soliciting his favour, his influence, or his money. Colocotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordato informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordato was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa who was governor of Mesolonghi, wrote, saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petrobey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds. With that sum not three hundred but three thousand Spartans would be put in motion to the frontier, and the fall of the Ottoman empire would be certain.6
Byron was never one to need much encouragement towards parsimony, but it was not now just his own money that was at stake. After an initial coolness in Britain to the fate of Greece, there were moves afoot in London to raise a Stock Exchange loan on her behalf, and as the sole agent of the London Greek Committee on the spot Byron had to take this into account. It made him move with a caution that other Philhellenes would have done well to emulate. He was not going to budge a foot farther until he could see his way, he told Trelawny, and to the Greeks he was equally firm. ‘And allow me to add once for all,’ he addressed their government in a letter,
I desire the well-being of Greece, and nothing else; I will do all I can to secure it; but I cannot consent, I never will consent that the English public, or English individuals, should be deceived as to the real state of affairs. The rest, gentlemen, depends on you: you have fought gloriously; act honourably towards your fellow-citizens, and towards the world; then it will no more be said, as it has been said for two thousand years, with the Roman historian, that Philopoeman was the last Grecian.7
The vigour and propriety of every action of Byron’s in these dealings with the Greek parties makes an extraordinary contrast with the indolent rhythms of his Italian life. There were certainly times on Cephalonia when the seeming hopelessness of his task made him wish that he had never come, and yet in spite of all the disappointments the truth is that he had not felt so alive and decisive in years, writing letters and meeting visiting Greeks, arranging or parrying loans, assessing military reports and projects for steam vessels, or playing the strategist with the English Representative and future conqueror of Sind, Colonel Napier.
He was also working to a strict regime preserved in the account of Pietro Gamba, Teresa Guiccioli’s brother. He would leave his bedroom at nine, and for the next two hours would deal with his correspondence, with Gamba to help. He would then breakfast on a cup of tea. At noon he would ride until three, and dine on cheese and vegetables. There would then be pistol shooting practice, and after that he would retire to his room until seven, only then emerging to talk until midnight.
There was, too, another aspect of Byron’s existence on Cephalonia which is more difficult to quantify but no less important to his emotional well-being. During the long years of exile in Italy there had never been any shortage of English acquaintances in his life, but the common denominator of the Pisa Circle, the tie as it were that bound them all together, was a sense of alienation which made their ‘Englishness’ a burden rather than a source of any emotional comfort.*
On Cephalonia it was different. Over the first three years of the Greek rebellion there had been a gradual thawing of British attitudes towards the insurgents, but Turkey was still technically an ally and Britain was as cautious in her sympathies for a people in revolt from their rightful sovereign as anywhere in conservative Europe. In the Ionian Isles, governed by that irascible foe of Greece, Sir Thomas Maitland, this caution shaded into downright hostility but Cephalonia was an exception. There, the underlying popular sympathy for the Greeks that ran as a powerful countercurrent to government policy, found eloquent support in the official Representative. Byron had chosen the island in the first place because of Napier’s strong Greek sympathies, and in his company or that of the garrison officers who surprised and touched Byron with the warmth of their welcome, he probably felt more entirely at home – more English even – than he had done in the seven years of his exile.
There was, however, little place for Trelawny in all this. Before he left Italy he had managed to half-convince himself that he was only using Byron to get to Greece, but as the ‘Childe’ moved from on board the Hercules into a cottage near Argostoli and settled into his fixed routine, the fears he had confided to Mary Shelley weeks earlier seemed only too justified. ‘The Poet’s attention’, he had written to her with an authentic mix of resentment and pride, ‘and professed kindness is boundless; he leaves everything to my discretion’;
if I had confidence in him this would be well, but I now only see the black side of it; it will eventually rob me of my free agency, by so weaving me in with his fortunes that I may have difficulty in separating myself from them.8
Even now this would probably not have much mattered, had he been able to feel any sense of importance in the connection. In Italy his feelings for Claire Clairmont had inevitably drawn him into her camp against Byron, and yet so long as he had been in charge of the Bolivar or giving orders on the Hercules he could at least preserve an illusion of independence that was his own best protection against his meanest instincts.
With their arrival on Cephalonia, however, and the sense of his own waning importance, even that illusory prop to his self-esteem was gone. He could go on competing in those kind of ways that were his sole resort, could shoot, box or swim better than Byron. But Byron now belonged to another and larger world than anything he could imagine, to a world of politics and finance which left him with a galling proof of his own insignificance and that sense of emotional abandonment which shadowed all his deepest relationships.
‘Dear Hunt,’ he wrote on 2 September, continuing a letter he had begun three weeks earlier: ‘You will see a long blank, in which nothing having been done, I had nothing to communicate.’9 It was a blank Trelawny was ill-equipped to fill. His motives for coming to Greece, his aspirations, had none of Byron’s complexity about them, none of his selflessness, and no room now for any of his circumspection. Whatever cloak of Byronic despair he might throw over them in his letters to Claire or Mary, he was there in search of raw excitement and little else.
‘When was there so glorious a banner as that unfurled in Greece?’ he had asked Claire in his last letter to her from Italy. ‘Who would not fight under it?’10 As the days stretched into weeks on Cephalonia, however, the prospect of fighting was looking increasingly distant. Rumours filtered across the channel that separated them from the Morea of ‘battles never fought, prisoners never taken’.11 There was talk of the islands and the Peloponnese at loggerheads; of the factions on the brink of civil war.
Despite the presence of refugees, though, they were no nearer that conflict than when they first arrived. By the beginning of September, Trelawny had determined to assert his independence and leave, to proceed to the Greek centre of government, he told Hunt, and ‘apply to be actively employed’.12 In a letter to Mary Shelley written four days later on the 6th, he was at once more venomous about his decision and more silkily double-tongued. ‘The Noble Poet has been seized with his usual indecision, when just on the brink’, he told her, ‘and when I would have him, without talking, leap.’
After being here a month in idleness, we seemed both to have taken our separate determination, his to return to Italy and mine to go forward with a tribe of Zuliotes to join a brother of Marco Bozzaris, at Missolonghi … He [Byron] has written nothing more, but will I doubt not. Our intimacy has never been ruffled, but smoother than ever, and I am most anxious in upholding his great name to the world.13
That last sentence is revealing. Whatever the private grievances that might emerge in his letters, Trelawny knew where his public credit lay. His plans, so extravagant in their telling here, were more circumscribed, more dependent on Byron than he would ever have confessed to the Pisan women. On 2 September, he was loading his belongings onto a small vessel, waiting for an opportunity to run the Turkish blockade under the cover of dark, and land on the western coast of the Peloponnese. His instructions were to go with Hamilton Browne to the Greek leaders, and acting as Byron’s secretaries, deliver letters and report back on the political situation.
On the night of the 6th, they were at last ready to leave. Their farewell was warm. ‘As I took leave of him,’ Trelawny recalled in his Records, ‘his last words were, “Let me hear from you often, – come back soon. If things are farcical, they will do for ‘Don Juan’; if heroical, you have another canto of ‘Childe Harold’.”’14
It was the last time Trelawny saw Byron. Farewells over, he and Hamilton Browne embarked on a caique for the short journey across to the Peloponnese, beaching the next morning without incident on the scruffy coastline beneath the half-ruined tower of the Pirgos customs house.
In classical times, this north-west corner of the Peloponnese had been celebrated for its prosperity, but the long depredations of Turkish rule had begun a task that two years of war had now completed. There was only a solitary guard on the customs post to mark their arrival, a ‘creature’ of Colocotrones living under semi-siege in a sort of hen coop at the top of the tower, reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up at night. It was a necessary precaution. The sole authority he recognized, he told Trelawny, was Colocotrones’s, but even his writ had a limited jurisdiction. A few days earlier a party of Turks from Patras had raided the village of Gastoumi a few miles to the north, killing a number of inhabitants and carrying off women and other booty.
Byron’s name, however, seemed enough to secure the guard’s co-operation and their bags went unsearched. They were treated to a breakfast of fowl and eggs, an execrable sweet wine and raki and then escorted on foot through a landscape of dunes and prickly thorn into Pirgos. That night they spent in the town. Twenty Spanish dollars secured them mules and a guide for the journey on to Tripolis and early the next morning they were ready to start.
In later years when Trelawny looked back to these first hours on Greek soil, reality was adjusted to fall more in line with expectations, and that single guard cowering in his hencoop was replaced by a squad of Moorish mercenaries. If Greece, however, fell short of what was required, Trelawny did not. His whole life had been an imaginative preparation for this, and he was ready. Like some initiate, he had held himself aloof from their hosts, from the sordid reality embodied in the poverty and pinched, emaciated faces of Pirgos. His old clothes were gone too, and he was dressed now in Suliote costume, ‘which wonderfully became him’, Hamilton Browne admiringly recorded, ‘being tall in stature and of a dark complexion, with a fine, commanding physiognomy’.15 Less than a day’s ride ahead of them lay the gentle, wooded hills among which the ancient shrine of Olympia nestled. Beyond those, clearly visible in the distance, and filled for every Philhellene with all the violent glamour of its classical past rose the massive and spectacular heartland of the central Peloponnese.
It was a hard, four-day journey to Tripolis and it was the afternoon of the first day before the two men emerged from a defile onto a long, narrow plain covering the remains of Olympia. Along its southern edge the River Alpheius marked their course, shallow and clear in the late summer, its gravelly bed broken up by little islets as it flowed westwards to its mythical union beneath the waters of the Mediterranean with the nymph Arethusa.
For many volunteers following this same route, the first sight of the river, with all its classical associations, came almost as a guarantee that their crusade had at last begun. To the Moreot peasants who lived on its ravaged banks it was nothing more romantic than the ‘Rufea’, but to every Philhellene who passed this way it was still stubbornly the ‘Alpheius’ – the river of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pausanias’s travels, the path not just into the central highlands where it has its source but into a Greece that was more real to them than the land they had come to save.
It is one of the paradoxes of ‘Philhellenism’ that while the word means the love of Modern Greece, as opposed to ‘Hellenism’ which is concerned with its past, it was precisely that past which had brought most volunteers to the war. It can seem at times, in fact, as if the Greece through which the volunteer travelled was two separate countries, occupying the same physical space and clothed in the same landscape, but as distinct in his mind as the Holy Land and modern Israel to the devout pilgrim, the present only sanctified by its association with a history which was at once inspiration and balm, moral justification and emotional crutch among the horrors of Balkan warfare. ‘The dress, the manners, the very ignorance of the people has something in it wild and original,’ Lytton Bulwer rhapsodized in a letter home that captures the mental confusions and immaturity of so many Philhellenes at this time.
We are brought back to our boyhood by the very name of Greece; and every spot in this land reminds us of the days devoted to its classic fables, and the scenes where we were taught them. Methinks I see old Harrow Churchyard, and its venerable yews, under whose shadow I have Iain many a summer evening.16
And now, as the two men skirted the plain of Olympia, it was this other and older Greece, invisible but potent, that lay quite literally buried around them beneath the silt left by centuries of inundation. Across the river a few piles of ruined brickwork and the odd massive fragment of marble from the temple of Zeus were visible, but six years before the first systematic excavations that was almost all of the ancient site that could be seen.
It is a futile but irresistible exercise to try to balance the profit and loss that stand between contemporary experience and the Greece the Philhellenes knew. There is such a deceptive feeling of immutability about even its ruins that it is easy to forget how different their Greece was, but it is worth remembering that for all the remote beauty of early nineteenth-century Olympia everything that now conjures up its classical past for us, the stadium, the treasuries, the Philippeion, the drinking cup of Pheidias, the inscribed helmet of Miltiades, the victor of Marathon – that supreme symbol of the Greece Philhellenism invoked with such totemic force – still belonged to the future.
There is a genuine poignancy in the image of a great classicist like Colonel Leake standing alone in the middle of what he called ‘a beautiful desert’,17 cut off by the mud as much from this future as Olympia’s history. With a man of his seriousness it is tempting to feel that he was born a century too soon, and yet for most Philhellenes the name itself was enough, the past all the richer for existing nowhere outside their imaginations, entwined with school-day memories and unfettered by an historical knowledge which Byron only half-jokingly denounced as the enemy of romance. Gladiators could fight here in the fancy where they had never trod in history, crowds bay for blood. ‘How striking the contrast between the silence of these fields,’ one Philhellene wrote of Olympia,
now melancholy and deserted, and their jubilee in the old times of Greece! One marvelled in re-peopling the spot, all lonely but for a few travellers on their sorry mules, with the glad assemblage of aspiring thousands; – in listening for the spirit of eloquence in that solitude, and looking on a desolate waste as the glittering arena of pride, valour, and wisdom.18
Here was a vision of Greece which in its dangerous sentimentality was fraught with certain disillusion, but for the moment it found an echo in a landscape as seductive as itself. Ahead of Trelawny and Browne waited the barren uplands and wild gorges of the central Morea, yet as they began their ascent out of the plain of Pisa, crossing and recrossing the Alpheius, they were in the world of myth and classical association which western art has so curiously expropriated for Arcadia.
In 1821, the young English volunteer William Humphreys, feverish and embittered by his first experience of warfare, had invoked the myth of Alpheius on the banks of the Rufea as if somehow he could wash away the contagion of reality in its pure, classical stream. Now, for Trelawny and Browne, the same magic held sway. The crops of maize and wheat which before the war had grown on its banks, were ruined or burned; but pines, and wild olive, groves of oaks and chestnuts, and thickets of vallonia still bore out Pausanias’s claims for the Alpheius as the ‘greatest of all rivers … the most pleasure giving to the sight’.19
Gradually, however, as they climbed, the gravitational pull of the past gave way to a more brutal present. Often their path would be scarcely wide enough for their mules, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet awaiting the first false step. On some outcrop of rock, a shepherd would suddenly appear, warily watching them, long gun in hand, his figure etched against a sky in which eagles soared.
On the second day it began to rain in torrents, bringing, even in September, a piercing cold. As night fell and they sought the rough shelter of an overhang they saw the lights of an isolated settlement. Approaching it, they were attacked by a pack of dogs. Trelawny was about to shoot when their owners appeared out of the dark, their faces, caught in the lurid glare of their torches, showing ‘the most ferocious and cut-throat countenances’ Browne had ever seen.20
In his years in the Ionian service stories had reached Hamilton Browne of travellers eaten alive by the dogs of these nomadic northern shepherds and the two men resigned themselves to a long and nervous night. They were refused food but were eventually allowed shelter, making beds out of sacks of maize, while their hosts huddled at a distance around their fire, eyeing Trelawny’s weapons and ‘jabbering in their own dialect’.21 The next morning they had ridden some distance when Trelawny discovered a pistol missing. On turning back, they were attacked again by the dogs. From high above them shots rang out as the shepherds swarmed down across the rocks, but they made their escape unharmed, injured in nothing worse than their dignity.
On the fifth day after landing at Pirgos they finally rode out of a narrow cut in the hills to see the towers and curtain walls of the town that only two years earlier had been the Ottoman capital of the Morea. As they made their way through the gate of the ruined city of Tripolis, the debris of its recent history lay on all sides. A few orange trees and the odd evergreen remained of the old seraglio gardens, but everything else was gone, looted and taken back on mules to the Mani, or smashed, burned or razed to the ground in the frenzy of destruction that had followed the town’s capture in October 1821.
There is a sense in which the brutalities of the Greek War of Independence all lie beyond imaginative recall, too sickening to be stomached in detail, too numbing to make much sense as statistics. Tripolis, however, seems to belong to another realm again, the ultimate expression of the racial and religious hatred that convulsed the Morea in the first summer of war. It is estimated that in the first weeks after the Greek flag was raised at Ayia Lavra, something like ten thousand Turks were slaughtered across the Peloponnese: in the days that followed the fall of Tripolis that number was to be doubled.
Throughout the long summer of 1821 the siege had dragged itself out in inimitable Greek fashion, heat, disease and starvation doing their grim work within the walls while Maniots bartered in their shadow and the captains negotiated their own private deals with the richer Turks. By the beginning of October it was clear the town could not hold out much longer. From all points of the Morea and even the islands, peasants congregated on the surrounding plain, determined to share in the spoils. Mutterings of discontent grew among the soldiers, conscious of negotiations that threatened their pockets, fearful of being balked of their reward. Then, on 4 October, a curious silence fell over the camp, an air of suppressed anticipation, the calm, as one witness put it, that was precursor of the bloody horrors to come.
All the Philhellene officers had left by this time except a young Frenchman in charge of the Greek artillery called Maxime Raybaud. Too young to do anything more than ‘assist’ France in her final reverses, as he quaintly put it, Raybaud had been culled from the French army in the cuts of 1820 and, inspired by thoughts of Ancient Sparta and Athens, joined Mavrocordato’s ship at Marseilles.
It was on 18 July that a Greek bishop had blessed their ship and Raybaud took his last emotional farewell of France. Less than three months later he watched as the morning sun rose bright above the barren plain on 5 October, burning with an implacable fierceness on a defenceless population about to expiate the crimes of four centuries of oppression. The air, Raybaud remembered, was heavy and dolorous. At nine o’clock a second French officer arrived at his tent, in time for the final rites. Half an hour later they heard a commotion from the direction of the town, and rushing out found that a small party of Greeks had forced the Argos gate, and the flag of independence was flying from a tower. As Raybaud ran into the town he became an impotent witness of Greece’s first great triumph of the war.
The streets were thick with unburied corpses, victims of famine and disease that lay putrefying where they had dropped. Soon, however, the stench of the dead mingled with that of fresh blood and fire as the Greeks began a long orgy of looting and revenge. They seemed to Raybaud to be everywhere, killing and mutilating, chasing their victims through the streets, the town’s packs of famished and maddened dogs in their wake, ready to tear apart the inhabitants and devour them as they fell. Beauty, age, sex, nothing could stop the attackers. Pregnant women were obscenely mutilated and butchered, children beheaded, dismembered and burned.
Wherever Raybaud went, helpless to interfere, there was the crackle of flames and the crash of masonry. Everywhere too there were the screams of victims, competing with another sound which was to haunt Raybaud’s memory – the guttural ululation of the Greek soldier in sight of his victim, and then the change of note as the ataghan was plunged in, an inhuman blood cry that was half scream, half laugh, ‘le cri de l’homme-tigre, de l’homme devorant l’homme’.22
If the sun beat down in judgement all that day, night brought no relief. The slaughter went on, and with it the search under the October moon for fresh victims, dragged from their hiding places. Mere death, as Raybaud says, was a gift of rare generosity. Some faced it when it came, however, with a curious impassivity, an indifference almost. Others, young women and children, driven by some inexplicable impulse, a symbiotic urge of victim and attacker to bring centuries of religious hatred to a supreme pitch, died goading their killers on to fresh brutalities with insults of ‘infidel’, ‘dog’, and ‘impure’. Only the discovery of one of the town’s Jews could divert a Greek’s hatred from his Turkish victims for a moment. Then he might stop even with his dagger raised, postponing the pleasure to assist in the roasting of a Jew, revenge for the indignities Constantinople’s Jews had heaped on Patriarch Gregorius’s corpse.
No one could end it. An order went out to stop the killing. It was ignored. A second order went out from Colocotrones that there should be no killing within the town’s walls, but that too was useless. Not even the dead were safe. Tombs were ransacked, bodies exhumed, fuel to the contagion that was the inevitable aftermath of siege.
Perhaps, though, the worst crime was still to come. After the first attack something between two and three thousand inhabitants, mainly women and children, were taken out and held in the Greek camp at the foot of the hills. On 8 October they were stripped naked, and herded into a narrow gorge just to the west of the town. It was a perfect killing field the attackers had chosen for their business, sealed off at one end so there could be no escape, its grey limestone walls streaked with red as if the rocks themselves bled in sympathy. There are no descriptions of what happened that day, but a week later the Scottish Philhellene and historian, Thomas Gordon, passed the scene on his way back to the Ionian Isles. He was never able to bring himself to write of it in his great history of the war, but while serving out his quarantine in the lazar house on Cephalonia he told the English doctor – a Doctor Thomson, whose report made its way back through Sir Thomas Maitland to London – what he had seen. The corpses lay where they had been butchered, ‘the bodies of pregnant women were ripped open, their bodies dreadfully mangled, their heads struck off and placed on the bodies of dogs, whilst the dogs heads were placed on theirs, and also upon their private parts.’23
There are towns and places which seem to remain the same through every change, as if there is some indestructible genius about them, some essence that will reassert itself like a damp mould through every disguise. It is perhaps nothing more than fancy that finds an echo of these horrors among the hills that squat so balefully above the modern town, and yet in the way Tripolis subverts history to the triumphalism of a national myth, we are brought as close as landscape or place can take us to the Greece of 1821.
With the bombast of its civic statuary, with the tyres, rubbish and broken-down trucks that mix with the brittle bones in that nearby gorge, Tripolis is even now a litmus test of sensibility that is not easy to fail and it is a sobering thought that in Trelawny’s account it merits only a casual half-line. It is often as worth noting what a man omits of his experience as what he includes, and Trelawny’s silence here – so different from Gordon’s – seems as eloquent as anything he wrote, an involuntary revelation of the man himself, a sudden glimpse into a moral abyss all the more chilling because he was too blind to try to hide it.