In the Front Line

A bullet in the back, a mine on the road, a bomb in a chocolate box--British civilians as well as soldiers were dying ugly deaths on Cyprus, and the British at home were getting into the kind of mood that approved the gallows on the golf course against the Mau Mau in Kenya. London's big popular newspapers demanded a "get tough" policy against the Greek Cypriot terrorists. Backbenchers in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Tory Party muttered that Britain's liberal Governor on Cyprus, Sir Hugh Foot, should be replaced by a military Governor--someone like stern Sir Gerald Templer, who used such collective-punishment measures as cutting the rice ration of villagers in Malaya to make them inform on Communists.

On Cyprus, Sir Hugh broadcast to British civilians: "You are all in the front line now. No one should say, 'It can't happen to me.' " Then the British began to put into action the most drastic measures yet taken against EOKA, the Greek terrorist organization, and against Greek Cypriots in general.

"Getting to grips with the bastards," Major General Kenneth Darling, Britain's tough-talking Cyprus operations chief, called it. Declared he: "Any Englishman who wants a gun may have one. But he must know how to use it. They're not a ration of potatoes." At a tent set up on an unused garbage dump outside the island's capital, Nicosia, British civilians lined up to receive .38 revolvers after demonstrating on a nearby target range that they could hit a life-sized tin terrorist at 15 ft. "You're unlikely to need more," one instructor explained. "The thing is always to look behind you."

In General Darling's "no-holds-barred" search for terrorists, soft-shoed British troops dropped at night from rooftops onto the balconies of Greek Cypriot homes, marched in through the unlocked doors to search for weapons in refrigerators and under beds. After three days the balcony raids were suspended because of complaints from Greek Cypriot women caught in various stages of undress by the unannounced visitors.

But after a terrorist bomb exploded under a settee in a Royal Air Force canteen, killing two airmen, the British in retaliation abruptly dismissed some 4,000 Greek Cypriot employees (but not the Turkish Cypriot employees) from all of the island's R.A.F. bases and canteens, thus throwing many innocent people out of work. If, as the British maintain, most Greek Cypriots deplore EOKA terrorism, they were being made to pay for it.

Such measures quieted the critics in London who were demanding the ouster of the man some called "Pussyfoot." So did Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's expression of "complete confidence in the Governor." But it was a measure of Britain's mood that when the call went out for 500 volunteers to serve in the canteens on Cyprus, no fewer than 17,000 (mostly women) stepped forward--by telephone and in queues that formed at 5 a.m.--to volunteer for duty in the turbulent front line.

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