Muddle at Missolonghi

By John Skow

THE GREEK ADVENTURE

by DAVID HOWARTH 253 pages. Atheneum. $10.

Byron had visited Greece before, so he presumably knew that changes had occurred there since the time of Pericles. But his mistress in Genoa screamed too much, and bored him. Perhaps being Byron bored him too.

Other European volunteers in the Greek war of independence knew the splendor of their own certitudes, but they did not know how or why war was fought in this often grubby and backward land that they honored as the cradle of Western civilization. And, of course, they did not know how to speak modern Greek. But they went anyway, intending to help the gallant Hellenes free themselves from the corrupt and perfumed tyranny (actually a rather benign rule) of the Turkish Sultan.

Turkish Yoke. The volunteers were of several sorts. The first, writes David Howarth in this wry and lively short history, consisted of officers left over from the Napoleonic wars of the previous decade. Each had at least one fine uniform, one sword and a brace of pistols. A few were what they said they had been; others actually had fought at grades several degrees below their announced ranks. A large number were simply counterfeit, like the Italian named Tassi, who said he had been Napoleon's engineer in chief but who confessed, when it became explosively clear he did not know how to handle artillery, that he was really a bankrupt saddler from Smyrna. Such magnificoes were very proud, Howarth relates, and they fought a great number of duels among themselves over matters of military precedence. Otherwise, there being no army for them to lead, they did little damage--even to the Turks.

The remaining volunteers were "philhellenes," or friends of Greece, most of them luckless university students from Germany, Poland, Switzerland or England who had taken the idealism of their Greek literature professors too much to heart. When they began to reach Greece by the dozens and then by the hundreds, they learned that no one knew they were coming, and no one wanted them. Devout Orthodox villagers, furthermore, did not share their reverence for the philosophers of the Golden Age, whom Eastern Christians abhorred as pagans. There was nothing for the philhellenes to do except flounder about and die. Enough did so that the great powers became queasy; all ports of embarkation to Greece, except Marseille, were soon closed to the student crusaders.

Greeks who lived in Western Europe had conceived the notion of throwing off the Turkish yoke and unifying, their country as a sovereign nation. However fashionable in Paris and London, this was an alien idea in Greece, incomprehensible to the wild tribesmen who actually lived there. When unorganized slaughter of Turkish citizens began in 1821, partly as the result of agitation by the expatriates, Greek fighting forces consisted mostly of mutually hostile guerrilla bands. Their chiefs fought, looted, connived, ran away or made peace separately, as they had always done, without regard to Western ideas of patriotism or military strategy. When Turks killed the rebellious brigands, they sent bags of ears back to the Sultan. When the Greeks won, they made pyramids of human heads.

Victories were trumpeted whenever a rifle was discharged. The London press reported triumphs on the order of Salamis and Marathon. Proclamations and constitutions also were reported, issued by competing delegations of penniless and powerless clerks, who scuttled about the countryside in city clothes and called themselves governments.

Ten Swords. Into this yeasty confusion Byron injected himself at the request of English philhellenes--as Howarth puts it, a "shrivelled, dyspeptic, doom-ridden little man" of 36, forlornly in love with his page. He had no military experience, but he had equipped himself with gold, scarlet and green uniforms and at least ten swords. He was courted ardently by all of the Greek factions, not because he was a great poet or an English lord, Howarth writes, and certainly not because he seemed to have some notion of leading the Greeks in battle, but because he had brought with him -L-9,000 in cash. It appears to have been the only ready money in Greece.

Byron died in 1824 of a fever, on a mud flat called Missolonghi, before he could do any fighting but not before most of his treasure had disappeared. His death, otherwise futile, stimulated English interest in the war. Two large bond issues were floated to help the Greeks, the proceeds of which were embezzled in London and stolen in Greece.

The effective end of this war of muddle and misconception came in 1827, by mistake, when a small English and French peace-keeping fleet aroused the suspicion of a large Turkish fleet at Navarino. The Turks, who had never learned gunnery, opened fire. They were cut to pieces, and the Sultan's domination came to an end. Author Howarth, an English naval historian (Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch), writes of it all wonderingly, although not flippantly. His book is good mean fun for readers who are tired of the posturings of warriors and statesmen -- then or now.

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