"If We Hold Fast . . ."

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War is a bad thing: but to submit to the dictation of other states is worse. Freedom, if we hold fast to it, will ultimately restore our losses, but submission will mean permanent loss of all that we value. . . . To those of you who call yourselves men of peace, I say: You are not safe unless you have men of action at your side.--Thucydides.

Modern Greeks needed such a man of action--who "restrained the multitudes while respecting their liberties." The man of action they got--Archbishop Da-maskinos (rhymes with "seen us"), Regent of Greece--returned last week to Athens after a busy fortnight in London and Paris.

Journey to the West. For him, for Greece and for the western world, it had been an interesting trip. The British had given him his first journey by air. In London he had talked with Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, the U.S.'s Jimmy Byrnes, and his exiled sovereign, George II. Thanks to the hostility of Viacheslav Molotov, the bearded statesman of Athens had been excluded from the sessions of the Council of Foreign Ministers (see INTERNATIONAL). But he had made his presence felt in London; he had dramatized the pivotal position of his country in the new geopolitics of the Mediterranean.

The Archbishop had also made a social stir. Tall (6 ft. 4 in.) and full of dignity, berobed in the black garb and silver chain ofj his churchly office, he cut a figure unique among modern statesmen. He impressed London hostesses by his great appetite for oriental pilaff (his aides cornered the dwindling London rice stocks), his fine Greek cigarets, the quantities of boiling Turkish coffee he consumed. He rode majestically through London's streets in a Rolls-Royce provided by the British Government. Finally, again by air, he had flown off to Paris and a royal Gallic welcome. Then, tired and rather wan, he had once more stepped into a plane and returned to Athens and his troubled people.

Born in Blood. No people in the postwar world had longed more for freedom; none had so endangered their liberties in their bloody efforts to win it. As Regent and Archbishop, Damaskinos was at once the product and the personification of the efforts and the dangers.

He was born of peasants, 54 years ago. in the brown hills of Thessaly, and he was one of 13 children. The old people of his town, Dobvitsa, still remember his huge boyhood appetite, and his way of wandering alone in the mountains. They tell a story of how he came to the church and, through it, to power.

One day, passing one of the many monasteries which cling to those hillsides, he paused before a picture of the Virgin. He put his last coin in the offering box, there & then resolved to enter the Greek Orthodox priesthood. An uncle, a well-to-do priest, shepherded him through the schools of Karditsa, where he excelled as a wrestler and javelin thrower.

The young man's thoughts were not solely of God: he studied law as well as theology at the University of Athens. In 1918, the year after he took holy orders, he achieved his first political triumph: an agreement resolving the nationalist quarrels of the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian monks who inhabit ancient, revered Mount Athos.

Two visits to the U.S. (in 1928 to raise money for earthquake victims; in 1930 to unite divided Greek Orthodox factions) increased both his clerical and lay stature in Greece. His first major essay at national politics came in 1938. Against the violent opposition of Dictator-Premier John Metaxas and the King whose powers Damaskinos now administers, he was elected Archbishop of all Greece--by one vote. Metaxas promptly annulled the election, put in the runner-up, Chrysanthos of Trebizond, and exiled Damaskinos to the mountain monastery of Phaneromene on Salamis.

This struggle against the King and authoritarian regimes sobered Damaskinos, tempered his enthusiasms. In the monastery Damaskinos developed his only hobby: a friend from Chicago sent him a portable harmonium, and the lonely cleric, with his pet goat and dog beside him, learned to pick out the weirdly beautiful Gregorian chants.

The Trial and the Rope. The war and German occupation brought Damaskinos to his full national stature. He returned to Athens as Archbishop after his old opponent, Chrysanthos, was dismissed for refusing to swear in the first quisling Premier, General George Tsolakoglu. But Archbishop Damaskinos was no stooge.

Against the Germans, Damaskinos fought with all the considerable might of his clerical robes, his glittering pectoral cross and pastoral staff, using them not as shelters but as shields. He saved hundreds of Jewish lives by encouraging Orthodox Greeks to harbor them. He achieved undying fame by substituting his name and those of his bishops for a list of hostages about to be shot for the death of a German soldier. If the Germans had not backed down, Damaskinos would have been the first to be shot. He had put his name at the head of the list.

When Damaskinos visited German military headquarters, he always carried a length of rope with him. When the Germans lost their tempers, Damaskinos would hand them the rope and say:

"If you wish to hang me, as the Turks did Gregorios, here is the rope."*

In a small and barren office, Damaskinos labored for the poor and oppressed. His philanthropies, though not connected directly with any one resistance movement, also succored the men in the hills. He banded his clergy into the EOCHA (National Organization of Christian Solidarity) to help those interned by the occupying powers. So popular was this organization that on several occasions quisling Greeks tried to exploit it. Damaskinos fiercely resisted, kept politicians' hands off. Toward occupation's end, the frustrated Germans put Damaskinos under house arrest.

Protector & Protected. No Greek would deny that Damaskinos holds his Regency today, and keeps his Government in power, only with the support of the British Army in Greece. On their fateful visit to Athens last December, at the height of the tragic battle between Greek and Greek, and Greek and Briton, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden chose Damaskinos as the one Greek who might save his countrymen from themselves--and who might save Greece for Britain and the western world.

Today British soldiers and diplomats keep uneasy watch in Athens. Of them, royalist Premier Petros Voulgaris recently said, "I wish they would [stay] here forever." Without them, neither Greece nor Britain could hope to attain the kind of democracy and stability which Churchill had laid down as the aim of British policy. The interests, ideological and imperial, which impelled Tory Churchill now held Laborites Attlee and Bevin to the identical policy.

Even with British support, Damaskinos and his Ministers had hard going. By Christmas, UNRRA in nine months will have distributed $245,000,000 worth of food and goods, is already feeding three million daily in Athens and Salonika. The U.S. has just granted a $250 million credit. Yet Greece was still a hungry nation, facing a threatening winter. Former Supply Minister Kyriakos Varvaressos, longtime head of the Bank of Greece, for a time stemmed and even counteracted the horrendous Greek inflation. But he was forced out three weeks ago.

The leftist EAM and its disarmed army, ELAS, had been vitiated. But Greeks had forgotten neither the valor nor the sins of the resistant Left, and the presence of thousands in Greek jails did nothing to erase the memories. Many a Briton on the spot, many a Greek who infinitely preferred Damaskinos to the harsh extremes of Left or Right, testified that Damaskinos' ministers often outdid the repressed Left in rigorous repression. In a telegram to Damaskinos, Attlee himself had deplored "right-wing excesses."

The ever-seething question whether King George II (or any king) should take the throne recently embroiled Damaskinos' first choice for the premiership, General Nicholas Plastiras, and led to his over throw. Distrusting him, royalists published the fact that Plastiras had invited German intervention during Greece's heroic war with Italy, forced Damaskinos to discard the General. Face lost, Plastiras tried to argue the matter with Damas kinos, and stormed out of the Regent's office crying "Tragos!" ["Billy goat!"]. Into office came harassed, tubby Admiral Petros Voulgaris, commander in chief of the Greek fleet and a follower of Greece's great statesman, Eleutherios Venizelos. The Voulgaris Government is nothing to brag about, and Archbishop Damaskinos carries most of the national burden.

The Stakes. The Regent's immediate problem is to carry Greece through this winter, hold elections for a new government, and see that government through. Then must come an explosive but unavoidable plebiscite on the monarchy.

Beating upon him within Greece are minority Communists and equally vocal Rightists. Between, and close to the heart of the ruling peasant from Thessaly, are the Greek millions who know only that they are weary of war, oppression, hunger, and of all extremes.

Beating upon him from without is the big-power contest for the Mediterranean.

By old agreement with Churchill, the Russians officially have kept hands off Britain's one remaining satellite on that shore of "Britain's sea." But Moscow glowers and grumbles, and Greek Communists -- profoundly distrusted now that the war of liberation is over -- do their best. Damaskinos' interim role is to hold the line, control Greece's inner ferment until the Greeks can choose for themselves.

In one sense, that choice cannot be truly free. For Greece, like her neighbors already in the Russian orbit, must look to outer friends for help and understanding. To those friends, as to his countrymen, the Archbishop of Greece might say with Thucydides:

Judging freedom to be happiness and courage to be the creator of freedom, it remains for you not to fear any risks, but to rival what these men have done.

* Patriarch Gregorios was seized in Constantinople by the Turks during the wars of 1821, hanged in front of the Patriarchate.

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