Off to War

The New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick does not match Hollywood's picture of the dashing foreign correspondent. Tiny (5 ft. 2 in.), elderly (67) Anne McCormick looks as if she would be more at home sipping tea with heads of state, which she frequently does. But last week Journalist McCormick, in addition to writing her column three times a week, was clambering up & down the mountains of Greece, and doing a workmanlike job of reporting the guerrilla war. Guided by Lieut. General James A. Van Fleet, head of the U.S. Military Mission, she journeyed to mountain outposts and inspected refugee and prison camps to get her story.

"It is easy enough," she cabled, "to say that the Greek war is an affair of daily raids in which armed bands . . . swoop down from the cracks and crevices of a mountain . . . to sack or burn villages and carry off able-bodied men and girls to forced service in their armies. But the imagination cannot picture the desolation that this hit-and-run fighting leaves behind it . . . Everywhere, the atmosphere was heavy with suspense. In such fearful quiet must the early settlers in the West have waited the descent of the Indians."

Worst off were the civilian refugees "living in tents and huts, with 50 to a room in schoolhouses or basements of public buildings. These half-starved, half-frozen fugitives form one-tenth of the population."

The captured guerrillas were "better fed and housed than the refugees." Even so, she found them "a miserable-looking lot wearing broken shoes and remnants of worn-out uniforms, Yugoslav, British or Greek. The prisoners looked like the poorest and stupidest of peasants with nothing to hope for and nothing to lose under any social system."

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