any form of government if their lives were spared, but their prayers for mercy were disregarded. Many were suffocated, and the rest. determined to leave the mosque, as the bullets and knives of the Christians were preferable to a slow death by fire. Outside a general massacre took place. Of those who escaped, some took refuge in a cave, where they were discovered twelve days afterwards. The Christians at once brought fresh supplies of brushwood in order to burn out the remaining Moslems, and succeeded in suffocating some of them. Three days afterwards, three insurgent leaders, Michaelis, Alexias, and another, arrived and persuaded their comrades to extinguish the flames and liberate the survivors. Thirteen of these were kept as hostages, and I was told on good authority that some of the wives and daughters of the Moslems who were captured were violated by the Christians. In the hospital at Candia, where a number of the wounded refugees are under treatment, I saw for myself how these Christians behave to helpless women and children when they get the upper hand. One beautiful girl of twenty was there with three hideous knife wounds-two in her head and one in her side; another woman had her ears cut off, and a little boy of five had been so shamefully mutilated that he died. When I afterwards accused the insurgents of these atrocities, they replied that it was the Mohammedans who had wounded their own wives and children in order to make the Powers believe that this was the work of the insurgents! One wonders if they seriously expected this tale to be believed. Many of the accounts given me by the weeping women-some of them the sole survivors of an entire family-were heartrending. The President of the Penal Court at Candia informed me that he had himself lost twenty-four relatives in the massacres of Sitia and Daphne. Thanks to the exertions of one or two officers, the lives of the gallant defenders of Malaxa were spared, but the prisoners had to be continually guarded by Italians and Greeks, to keep the Cretans from shooting them down in cold blood. If the Powers do not grant Colonel Vasos full permission to send his prisoners to Greece or elsewhere outside Crete, the blockade will continue to furnish an excuse for the slaughter of any subsequent prisoners, which is confessed by their leaders to be the usual practice of the insurgents. My bestowal of a few cigarettes and oranges on some Turkish prisoners at Kontopoulo was employed by the Christians as one of their pretexts for openly insulting me and detaining me as a prisoner. They afterwards fired two bullets at my head on the absurd ground that I was attempting to escape, because the Greek soldier who guarded me insisted that I should accompany him about fifty yards from the village as a measure of precaution against the shells which were falling about us. In short, the less said about Christianity as a political factor in the Cretan question the better.

The Turkish troops in their struggle with the insurgents are at

present outnumbered by about thirty to one, but I doubt very much, even if the combatants in Crete were left to fight it out, whether the Christians would do more than they have hitherto succeeded in doing-viz. invest the towns. We have heard a great deal of the heroism of these Cretan patriots, but one sees very little of this in the actual fighting which takes place in the island. The Cretan insurgents never come to close quarters unless in overwhelming numbers; hence, they carry no bayonets. Rifle fire from behind

rocks is their favourite method of warfare. Take, for instance, the engagement at Malaxa. The correspondent of the Daily Graphic, who only witnessed the fight from Suda Bay, stated that 'about 4 o'clock the insurgents rushed the building in really gallant style.' This account is altogether wrong. I was present on the field and saw the fighting. The forty-three Turks who still remained in the blockhouse defended it with the utmost gallantry from daybreak till 2.45 against hundreds of insurgents. They had had no water for three days--so an officer told me-and very little food. Yet exhausted as they were, and scarcely able to reply to the terrific rifle and artillery fire of their assailants, they held the wretched blockhouse till they could do so no longer, when they raised the white flag and admitted the Cretans. The insurgents did not rush the building at all; on the contrary, for hours before its surrender they crept about it amongst the rocks, shouting out, like curs yelping round a wounded quarry they dare not touch, 'We've got you now! Wait till night comes! When it is dark we will come back with dynamite and blow you up!' The insurgents are, in fact, an undisciplined rabble who would be routed by the Turkish regulars if they met on anything like equal terms. Troops like those who made the thirteen desperate attacks up the slopes of the Shipka Pass would, if they were present in sufficient numbers and allowed a free hand, speedily sweep this Cretan canaille from the Malaxa ridge.

Everyone who has mixed with the insurgents must be struck by the fact that their demands are invariably formulated by Greeks or Italians. It is almost hopeless to seek for any intelligent comment upon the political questions at issue from the Cretans themselves, who have the haziest notions of anything except that they are fighting against the hated Turk as their fathers fought before them, In fact, I suspect very strongly that the ignorant villagers are purposely kept in the dark by the Greeks as to the real raison d'être of the international fleet in Suda Bay. A body of them at Rothia evidently believed that England intended shortly to seize Crete for herself. There is a story in one of the German papers which, I believe, is quite true, that at a recent conference between some European naval officers and the insurgents, the latter were represented by six gentlemen, of whom two appeared in gold-rimmed spectacles, two wore silk hats, and two were Italians! Again, can anyone be deceived into believing that

the majority of the so-called 'Proclamations of the Cretan People' really issue from other than Greek sources? In one of these productions the Cretan refugees in Greece are made to speak as follows: 'Why did they (i.e. the Powers) not let us die at the hands of the Turkish assassins and incendiaries rather than that we should come to await here the effects of the cruel sentence of the Admirals against our compatriots, against our relations-a sentence which does not allow us even to go and share with them the Dantesque anguish to which they are condemned without pity?' There is an unmistakably Hellenic flavour ahout this inflated nonsense.

I was on one occasion fortunate enough to find myself in the midst of a considerable body of insurgents entirely free from the Greek or Italian element. I asked them what they considered the best form of government for Crete. They seemed to have no very definite conception of what was meant by either autonomy or annexation, though they were apparently unanimous in desiring the latter. At the same time there was about these Cretans, pure and simple, a lack of that frenzied enthusiasm for evwois, which one finds in places where the leaven of Vasos and his friends has been more fully at work, and they confessed that a short time previous to my visit there had existed among them some differences of opinion on the question of Hellenic annexation. The insurgents are always represented by the Greeks as determined to die rather than accept autonomy. 'If you give us autonomy,' said one of these rhetorical warriors to me, ‘you will find nothing but trees to give it to.' All this is very fine and melodramatic, but on the face of it rather absurd. Is it credible that a people would rather die with their wives and families than be permitted to govern themselves in their own way? I was informed that a resolution had been arrived at that anyone who proposed the acceptance of autonomy should be shot. So much for the free discussion of this question in the interior of the island!

The Cretans are not 'fighting for the liberty of their fatherland,' which has already been amply guaranteed to them by the Powers. They are fighting now, whether they know it or not, simply in order to satisfy Hellenic greed for additional territory. Enthusiasm for the freedom of Crete is a very thin veneer upon the schemes of Greek ambition.

The delay experienced in the solution of the Cretan question is quite intelligible to anyone who recognises its enormous difficulty and complexity. What an object lesson in international jealousies is presented to us in Suda Bay at present! Then, again, all attempts to formulate some generally acceptable form of government for Creté are continually hampered by the unwillingness of the insurgents to abstain from military action until the question is settled. The active sovereignty of Turkey over the island has of course come to an end, without any very poignant regret on the part of the more 3 B

VOL. XLI-No. 243

enlightened Turks, who fully recognise that the Sultan has never received any benefit from the possession of the island, which has rather been a constant source of anxiety and expenditure. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how any form of autonomy could. succeed in Crete, for a people less capable of self-government it would be difficult to find. Hellenic annexation is perhaps the worst proposal which could be made. Greece is practically bankrupt, and without the generous assistance of private individuals the frontier armies could never have been equipped and dispatched from Athens. Anyone who has lived in Greece and experienced the dingy squalor of Greek provincial life, even in the most fertile parts of the Peloponnese, can realise how utterly incapable the Greeks would be of adequately developing the resources of Crete. Nor, indeed, could Greece afford the troops and gendarmerie, which would certainly be required, after the glamour of annexation had worn off, to compel these antinomian Cretans to pay taxes, five times as heavy as those which have been demanded of them, with or without success, under the Turkish régime. In the absence of such adequate military protection, no security whatever would exist for the lives and property of the Moslem minority.

The real salvation of this island, full as it is of manifold possibilities, would be its annexation by one of the Powers. If Lord Beaconsfield had asked the Sultan for Crete instead of the useless Cyprus! In case mutual jealousies and conflicting interests prevent the acquisition of Crete by some one of the Powers, then let them at any rate guarantee the establishment of a firm and just government. To hand over the island to Greece would be to commit one of the gravest political mistakes, not to say crimes, of the century.

It is certainly high time that this beautiful island enjoyed some measure of peace and prosperity. Its history throughout the present century has indeed been 'written in blood and tears.' Revolution after revolution has left its cruel memories behind it, and the peasants often speak of the awful tragedies of former years, like that terrible night in 1866 when hundreds of women and children fled from their burning homes and were frozen to death on the snow-clad slopes of the White Mountains. An aged priest who was talking to me of the many calamities of his country quoted pathetically enough the complaint of the Psalmist : Thou hast shown Thy people heavy things,

Thou hast made us to drink the wine of staggering.

How heartily one sympathised with his prayer that the reign of bloodshed and anarchy would speedily cease and the sun of righteousness at length arise upon this unhappy island with healing in his wings!

ERNEST N. BENNETT.

AMONG THE LIARS

ALTHOUGH the names of Canea and the surrounding villages have become household words, and are now important factors in contemporary history, it is only during the last few months that they have sprung into such prominence. At the time I visited the country, about two years ago, very few people knew anything about Crete at all, except that St. Paul suffered shipwreck there or thereabouts, and that the population were liars and otherwise undesirable acquaintances. Accounts of revolutions in the island were occasionally given in the newspapers, but they excited little interest.

Canea is not an easy spot for the ordinary traveller to reach. The writer was away from England a little over a month, and during that time travelled on no less than seven different steamers and passed through thirteen custom houses. Boats run twice a week from Athens, viâ Candia and Retimo, on uncertain days and at a very moderate speed, and this is the only way of reaching the island.

My companion was one well known in the world of sport and a frequent contributor to these pages; yet with all his experience to assist us we were doomed to return empty-handed—indeed, without firing a shot. The attraction for us in the island lay in the reputed existence of the Cretan ibex (Capra ægagrus) or‘agrimia' in the precipitous mountains on the south coast. We were unable to get any information with reference to the animal except from the pages of Pliny and vague references by other travellers of less antiquity. We were unable to find that any European had ever shot them, and it was not until we landed at Candia and found the horns and hide of a young buck hanging on the back of an old fakir' that we felt really sure of the existence of our quarry. On our arrival two days later at Canea, however, Mr. (now Sir Alfred) Biliotti, H.B.M. Consul, gave us a most encouraging account: the agrimia were said to be fairly plentiful in a certain locality and were frequently shot by shepherds; there was a mule track right across the island, and there would be no difficulty in keeping ourselves supplied with provisions.