Irene?

GREECE Irene? Rain fell on election day. "Tears," said an Athens policeman, looking up at the sky. He meant that 2,750 of the 3,000 candidates for Greece's 250-man Parliament would be disappointed.

Few, however, would be able to say that they were robbed. The election was the cleanest and most orderly in the history of modern Greece. In Athens, not a shot was fired in anger. Said a voter: "It was not like this in the old days. I remember when ambulances dashed about picking up bodies. This is like a British election."

Silent Amnesty. Rural districts were equally peaceful. The peasants had declared a silent amnesty for many guerrillas who had returned home from the mountains. At Agios Georgios on the slopes of Mt. Helicon, the polling place was the schoolhouse from which guerrillas last year had kidnaped the teacher. An election committee of village elders--all with white mustaches, goatskin jackets and shepherd's crooks--presided over the poll. When an American reporter entered they said in chorus: "All is quiet."

Barba Katsikogianni, 89, said: "I was president of this village in 1913. I was president when the Italians came and my old woman got a bad heart from fright. I was president when the Germans came to find the British officers we were hiding; and I was president last year when the goat-thieves [guerrillas] came to drag me up to Helicon . . . [He was saved when the Communists fled before an approaching army unit.] Lots of the young ones who were up there are back in the village now. Two of them--Danos and Georgios --were with me in the voting line. But we're glad they've come back, and now all that's forgotten." Old Barba poured out some golden wine and drank a toast: "To something we all want: irene--peace."

Whether the Greeks would get their long-sought peace was another question. Greece's system of proportional representation virtually guarantees governmental instability. It was almost certain that Greece would have another coalition government of minority parties.

When 1,000,000 out of about 1,300,000 votes had been counted, it appeared that a left-of-center party called the National Progressive Union of the Center had made a surprisingly strong showing. Top man of this group is General Nicholas Plastiras, 67, a hero of the Greco-Turkish war of 1922, in which he was known to the Greeks as "The Black Horseman" and to the Turks as "Black Pepper" (what's left of his raven hair is now white). Plastiras led an antiRoyalist coup in 1922; he intended to execute Prince Andrew, father of Britain's Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, but a British destroyer dashed up and rescued Andrew from Plastiras. Later, Plastiras was deposed and exiled.

A British destroyer brought Plastiras home in 1944 in the hope that he would use his influence to induce Communist-led rebels to lay down their arms. Most Communists, whose party is outlawed, probably voted for Plastiras or for the Democratic Front party of John Sofian-opoulos.

Eager Traveler. With returns incomplete, Plastiras' party was neck-and-neck with Dino Tsaldaris' Populists (Royalists). Sophocles Venizelos' Liberals were next. Sofianopoulos' Democratic Front, which got one-third of the vote in Athens, Piraeus and Salonika, was fourth, and the Social Democrats were fifth. The Social Democrats are resolute antiCommunists, but Sofianopoulos' group believes that it can do business with the Reds. As the returns came in he said cryptically: "My hobby is traveling," meaning that he would like to be Foreign Minister and try out some of his ideas for appeasing Russia.

Other Greeks had other ideas on this score, and thousands this week settled down to a favorite national pastime: scribbling possible cabinet lists on the backs of cigarette boxes. If the scribbling was productive, Greece might get what old Barba Katsikogianni longed for and what Greece herself had not known since 1940--Irene.

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