The Flame

Nostalgia for ancient grandeur welled up last week in Greece. It was too bad that the Red guerrillas were still around to spoil things, like mosquitoes at a garden party.

Maria Angelakopoulou, a pretty, 19-year-old Girl Scout, had the biggest day of her life. In Olympia, site of the Temple of Zeus, she kindled a flame for the Olympic Games at London by focusing the sun's rays on an olive branch. Maria's family was poor; her traditional white garment was a piece of borrowed store cloth held together with pins. Red bandits had cut off Olympia until the day before the ceremonies, so that only the skimpiest rehearsals were possible. A song from Euripides, to be chanted by a dozen small boys, was omitted. Khaki-clad riflemen and mortar crews stood around to keep the Communist pests away.

When Maria's olive branch flamed up, she touched it to a 2,400-year-old lamp (see cut). From the lamp, the Olympic torch was lighted and handed to a runner, who began the long relay to London, with an armed escort.

At the fishing village of Katakalon, the night before, officers of the Greek (ex-British) destroyer Hastings had invited British officials and Anglo-American newsmen to an "Olympic torch party" in a restaurant. The party was gay. Lieut. Colonel John Casey, a pink-faced, ginger-mustached member of the British mission, was singing a Greek ballad, Mavra Matya (Black Eyes) when a burst of Communist machine-gun fire thudded into the building. One gendarme was killed trying to douse the lights; the others got down under the tables. Casey went on singing in the darkness to cover the departure of two Greeks who sneaked out, reached the shore, swam half a mile to the Hastings and told what had happened. The Hastings put a landing party ashore and fired its four-inch guns into the black mountainside. After that, no more was heard from the raiders.

In northern Greece, Communist General Markos continued his stubborn defense of his Mount Grammos stronghold, which six government divisions were attacking. Markos' men cut off part of a convoy and burned alive 16 wounded soldiers caught in it. Then he broadcast a "peace offer"--which Athens, deeming it a fake, rejected.

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