In 1821, the young English volunteer William Humphreys, feverish and embittered by his first experience of warfare, had invoked the myth of Alpheius on the banks of the Rufea as if somehow he could wash away the contagion of reality in its pure, classical stream. Now, for Trelawny and Browne, the same magic held sway. The crops of maize and wheat which before the war had grown on its banks, were ruined or burned; but pines, and wild olive, groves of oaks and chestnuts, and thickets of vallonia still bore out Pausanias’s claims for the Alpheius as the ‘greatest of all rivers … the most pleasure giving to the sight’.19
Gradually, however, as they climbed, the gravitational pull of the past gave way to a more brutal present. Often their path would be scarcely wide enough for their mules, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet awaiting the first false step. On some outcrop of rock, a shepherd would suddenly appear, warily watching them, long gun in hand, his figure etched against a sky in which eagles soared.
On the second day it began to rain in torrents, bringing, even in September, a piercing cold. As night fell and they sought the rough shelter of an overhang they saw the lights of an isolated settlement. Approaching it, they were attacked by a pack of dogs. Trelawny was about to shoot when their owners appeared out of the dark, their faces, caught in the lurid glare of their torches, showing ‘the most ferocious and cut-throat countenances’ Browne had ever seen.20
In his years in the Ionian service stories had reached Hamilton Browne of travellers eaten alive by the dogs of these nomadic northern shepherds and the two men resigned themselves to a long and nervous night. They were refused food but were eventually allowed shelter, making beds out of sacks of maize, while their hosts huddled at a distance around their fire, eyeing Trelawny’s weapons and ‘jabbering in their own dialect’.21 The next morning they had ridden some distance when Trelawny discovered a pistol missing. On turning back, they were attacked again by the dogs. From high above them shots rang out as the shepherds swarmed down across the rocks, but they made their escape unharmed, injured in nothing worse than their dignity.
On the fifth day after landing at Pirgos they finally rode out of a narrow cut in the hills to see the towers and curtain walls of the town that only two years earlier had been the Ottoman capital of the Morea. As they made their way through the gate of the ruined city of Tripolis, the debris of its recent history lay on all sides. A few orange trees and the odd evergreen remained of the old seraglio gardens, but everything else was gone, looted and taken back on mules to the Mani, or smashed, burned or razed to the ground in the frenzy of destruction that had followed the town’s capture in October 1821.
There is a sense in which the brutalities of the Greek War of Independence all lie beyond imaginative recall, too sickening to be stomached in detail, too numbing to make much sense as statistics. Tripolis, however, seems to belong to another realm again, the ultimate expression of the racial and religious hatred that convulsed the Morea in the first summer of war. It is estimated that in the first weeks after the Greek flag was raised at Ayia Lavra, something like ten thousand Turks were slaughtered across the Peloponnese: in the days that followed the fall of Tripolis that number was to be doubled.
Throughout the long summer of 1821 the siege had dragged itself out in inimitable Greek fashion, heat, disease and starvation doing their grim work within the walls while Maniots bartered in their shadow and the captains negotiated their own private deals with the richer Turks. By the beginning of October it was clear the town could not hold out much longer. From all points of the Morea and even the islands, peasants congregated on the surrounding plain, determined to share in the spoils. Mutterings of discontent grew among the soldiers, conscious of negotiations that threatened their pockets, fearful of being balked of their reward. Then, on 4 October, a curious silence fell over the camp, an air of suppressed anticipation, the calm, as one witness put it, that was precursor of the bloody horrors to come.
All the Philhellene officers had left by this time except a young Frenchman in charge of the Greek artillery called Maxime Raybaud. Too young to do anything more than ‘assist’ France in her final reverses, as he quaintly put it, Raybaud had been culled from the French army in the cuts of 1820 and, inspired by thoughts of Ancient Sparta and Athens, joined Mavrocordato’s ship at Marseilles.
It was on 18 July that a Greek bishop had blessed their ship and Raybaud took his last emotional farewell of France. Less than three months later he watched as the morning sun rose bright above the barren plain on 5 October, burning with an implacable fierceness on a defenceless population about to expiate the crimes of four centuries of oppression. The air, Raybaud remembered, was heavy and dolorous. At nine o’clock a second French officer arrived at his tent, in time for the final rites. Half an hour later they heard a commotion from the direction of the town, and rushing out found that a small party of Greeks had forced the Argos gate, and the flag of independence was flying from a tower. As Raybaud ran into the town he became an impotent witness of Greece’s first great triumph of the war.
The streets were thick with unburied corpses, victims of famine and disease that lay putrefying where they had dropped. Soon, however, the stench of the dead mingled with that of fresh blood and fire as the Greeks began a long orgy of looting and revenge. They seemed to Raybaud to be everywhere, killing and mutilating, chasing their victims through the streets, the town’s packs of famished and maddened dogs in their wake, ready to tear apart the inhabitants and devour them as they fell. Beauty, age, sex, nothing could stop the attackers. Pregnant women were obscenely mutilated and butchered, children beheaded, dismembered and burned.
Wherever Raybaud went, helpless to interfere, there was the crackle of flames and the crash of masonry. Everywhere too there were the screams of victims, competing with another sound which was to haunt Raybaud’s memory – the guttural ululation of the Greek soldier in sight of his victim, and then the change of note as the ataghan was plunged in, an inhuman blood cry that was half scream, half laugh, ‘le cri de l’homme-tigre, de l’homme devorant l’homme’.22
If the sun beat down in judgement all that day, night brought no relief. The slaughter went on, and with it the search under the October moon for fresh victims, dragged from their hiding places. Mere death, as Raybaud says, was a gift of rare generosity. Some faced it when it came, however, with a curious impassivity, an indifference almost. Others, young women and children, driven by some inexplicable impulse, a symbiotic urge of victim and attacker to bring centuries of religious hatred to a supreme pitch, died goading their killers on to fresh brutalities with insults of ‘infidel’, ‘dog’, and ‘impure’. Only the discovery of one of the town’s Jews could divert a Greek’s hatred from his Turkish victims for a moment. Then he might stop even with his dagger raised, postponing the pleasure to assist in the roasting of a Jew, revenge for the indignities Constantinople’s Jews had heaped on Patriarch Gregorius’s corpse.
No one could end it. An order went out to stop the killing. It was ignored. A second order went out from Colocotrones that there should be no killing within the town’s walls, but that too was useless. Not even the dead were safe. Tombs were ransacked, bodies exhumed, fuel to the contagion that was the inevitable aftermath of siege.
Perhaps, though, the worst crime was still to come. After the first attack something between two and three thousand inhabitants, mainly women and children, were taken out and held in the Greek camp at the foot of the hills. On 8 October they were stripped naked, and herded into a narrow gorge just to the west of the town. It was a perfect killing field the attackers had chosen for their business, sealed off at one end so there could be no escape, its grey limestone walls streaked with red as if the rocks themselves bled in sympathy. There are no descriptions of what happened that day, but a week later the Scottish Philhellene and historian, Thomas Gordon, passed the scene on his way back to the Ionian Isles. He was never able to bring himself to write of it in his great history of the war, but while serving out his quarantine in the lazar house on Cephalonia he told the English doctor – a Doctor Thomson, whose report made its way back through Sir Thomas Maitland to London – what