“Since I last wrote to you, through the medium of Mr. Hobhouse, I have received and forwarded a letter from Captain Blaquiere to me, from Corfu, which will show how he gets on.  Yesterday I fell in with two young Germans, survivors of General Normann’s band.  They arrived at Genoa in the most deplorable state—­without food—­without a soul—­without shoes.  The Austrians had sent them out of their territory on their landing at Trieste; and they had been forced to come down to Florence, and had travelled from Leghorn here, with four Tuscan livres (about three francs) in their pockets.  I have given them twenty Genoese scudi (about a hundred and thirty-three livres, French money,) and new shoes, which will enable them to get to Switzerland, where they say that they have friends.  All that they could raise in Genoa, besides, was thirty sous.  They do not complain of the Greeks, but say that they have suffered more since their landing in Italy.

“I tried their veracity, 1st, by their passports and papers; 2dly, by topography, cross-questioning them about Arta, Argos, Athens, Missolonghi, Corinth, c.; and, 3dly, in Romaic, of which I found one of them, at least, knew more than I do.  One of them (they are both of good families) is a fine handsome young fellow of three-and-twenty—­a Wirtembergher, and has a look of Sandt about him—­the other a Bavarian, older and flat-faced, and less ideal, but a great, sturdy, soldier-like personage.  The Wirtembergher was in the action at Arta, where the Philhellenists were cut to pieces after killing six hundred Turks, they themselves being only a hundred and fifty in number, opposed to about six or seven thousand; only eight escaped, and of them about three only survived; so that General Normann ’posted his ragamuffins where they were well peppered—­not three of the hundred and fifty left alive—­and they are for the town’s end for life.’

“These two left Greece by the direction of the Greeks.  When Churschid Pacha over-run the Morea, the Greeks seem to have behaved well, in wishing to save their allies, when they thought that the game was up with themselves.  This was in September last (1822):  they wandered from island to island, and got from Milo to Smyrna, where the French consul gave them a passport, and a charitable captain a passage to Ancona, whence they got to Trieste, and were turned back by the Austrians.  They complain only of the minister (who has always been an indifferent character); say that the Greeks fight very well in their own way, but were at first afraid to fire their own cannon—­but mended with practice.

“Adolphe (the younger) commanded at Navarino for a short time; the other, a more material person, ’the bold Bavarian in a luckless hour,’ seems chiefly to lament a fast of three days at Argos, and the loss of twenty-five paras a day of pay in arrear, and some baggage at Tripolitza; but takes his wounds, and marches, and battles in very good part.  Both are very simple, full of naivete, and quite unpretending:  they say the foreigners quarrelled among themselves, particularly the French with the Germans, which produced duels.