A Poet Waits

Our munitions are scarce, very scarce. We always keep them for tomorrow. But we hold the town without paying the enemy back. We hold it with our hearts.

Author of these words is a passionately liberal Greek poet and scholar, 40-year-old Panayotis Kanellopoulos. He was in exile when he wrote them, and he knew the tragedy of Greece from his own bitter experience. As a volunteer army private, he had helped his countrymen hold back the Italian invaders. Then, amid chaos, confusion and treachery, he had stumbled back with them to Athens when the Germans moved in. Eventually he escaped, last March became War Minister and Vice Premier of the Greek Government in Exile. Four weeks ago he resigned. Last week the exiled government had moved from London to Cairo--2,300 miles nearer the homeland which invasion will some day recover from the Axis.

The stodgy government of Premier Emmanuel Tsouderos, onetime rich Athenian banker, was still in ferment. In an effort to placate the liberal element formerly represented by Kanellopoulos alone, four old ministers had been replaced by four new ones. Greek Army Fascists had been tossed out of the high command of Free Greek battalions in Egypt and Syria. The Government has promised to resign when Greece is liberated, and weak-willed King George has likewise promised to "conform to the will of the people."

A momentarily detached but still potent factor in these doings is Poet-Politician Kanellopoulos. He has the burning zeal and energy of a John the Baptist, and to some he looms as a promising leader of the New Europe. By his resignation and his refusal to rejoin the new government, he has shrewdly strengthened his own position, in that he publicly disavows responsibility for the acts of Tsouderos & Co. Panayotis Kanellopoulos is backing his conviction that the liberated European nations will choose their postwar leaders from those who opposed the miserable past and personify a better future.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.