Eyoub’s orders to cross the frontier with his solid column of thirty to forty thousand men, and march straight to Athens if the attacks persisted another day, were peremptory, and there was no force or dispositions of defense to prevent his triumphal movement.  There were no defensive works, for the jingo Greeks ridiculed the idea of needing a defensive preparation against an invasion of the Turkish army, which they were confident of annihilating ten to one.  There was no lack of personal courage on the part of the Greek population, but there was no efficient organization even of the so-called regular army, and there was really nothing to prevent a Turkish walk-over as far as the old frontiers of Greece, and even there there were no earthworks.

The sequence was disgraceful and humiliating.  I wrote at the time that “The wounded are not yet all in the hospitals when the attacks on Tricoupi for having ordered the demobilization already begin in the Chamber and the press.  His happy arrival at the moment of danger has saved Greece from, a disaster which, now that it is averted, the Greeks in general will never believe to have been so near, and will not accept as a lesson.”  And for the trifling part I had taken in the final negotiations I was afterwards insulted in the streets of Athens as having “prevented the Greeks from marching to Constantinople.”  They got their lesson years after, when they were far better prepared for war than on this occasion.  But Tricoupi was right when he said that the blockade was a mistake, and that the powers should have allowed the Greeks to take their own course and learn their lesson.  Undiscriminating Philhellenism has been the worst enemy of Greece.

The flurry over and quiet restored, the heat, the excitement, and the hard and unremitting work and anxiety of that month of May told on me, and I broke down with an attack of nervous prostration and acute dyspepsia, by which I was quite incapacitated from movement.  Taking the first steamer to Naples, I passed the rest of the summer at Rome, disabled, until the heats had passed, for any considerable exertion.  But, contrary to the general superstition regarding Rome, it is a city where one may pass the summer months most agreeably if not very actively.  The English ambassador of that time, Sir John Saville Lumley, afterwards Lord Saville of Burford, to whom I owe many delightful hours in that and subsequent years, used to say that he knew no city where one could pass the year so delightfully as in Rome.  By strict diet and an activity limited to the hours of the early morning and afternoon I weathered the summer, but each return of the heats during the succeeding six years brought me a relapse, so that on the whole I paid a long penalty for my participation in Greek politics.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CRISPI—­A SECRET-SERVICE MISSION—­MONTENEGRO REVISITED