Decision at Delphi Read Online Free PDF Page A

people crucifying themselves...
    You know what? I’ve just talked myself out of the captain’s dinner. Who am I, anyway, the man who never can find room in his suitcase for a dinner jacket, to lower the tone of an haut monde evening with my simple little tweed?) I’ll settle for a ham sandwich and a pot of coffee in my cabin. Because Gibraltar is going to swing into view tomorrow, and I have a letter to write. Sure, it’s an important letter. I ought to have written it before this. Why didn’t I? Now that’s a question without an answer. But I’ll write it tonight. To a man called Alexander. Alexander Christophorou. It’s possible he won’t remember a very young seaman from a United States destroyer. On the other hand, he is the kind of man who might just remember.
    Wallis, back in New York, was wondering if Alexander were still alive. I hope so. I’d like to look at the Acropolis with him again. This time, we wouldn’t be pressing our bellies into the cold hard ground on a little rock-covered hill, shivering in the bitter night wind from the north, listening to random blunt-nosed bullets striking the southern colonnade of the Parthenon instead of the British paratroopers who were garrisoned up there. Yes, the Brits and the Parthenon, with sandbags piled high around them both. I kept hoping the sandbags were high enough. And I’d give a silent cheer when a mortar bomb hit the rock face itself instead of the temple above. I guess there were some good Athenians among the artillery-men: they aimed low, at least. And above us all rose the white marble pillars turning to red in the glare of burning buildings in the city below.
    Remember that, will you, if you ever visit the Parthenon? Sure, it’s true. December, 1944. A Christmas of siege and civil war and savagery. You can’t believe it? No; nor could the Athenians. The ones who spoke English would stop me on thestreet when they saw my American uniform. “It isn’t Greeks who are doing this,” they told me. They’d catch me by the arm to make me listen, as if some—oh, sure, laugh at me, but that’s what I saw in their eyes—as if some agony inside them drove them to talk to the stranger who was seeing their city in a way no city should ever be seen. A place of hate and hurt and vengeance; “It’s the Bulgarians,” they said. “Bulgarians and Albanians and German deserters. It can’t be Greeks.” Then they’d leave me. And there was something in their haunted faces that even an embarrassed kid of nineteen couldn’t shake himself free from. These were proud people, and proudest of their civilisation. They had just discovered that barbarians lived among them.
    Perhaps there was guilt mixed with shame, too. Some of them, you see, had welcomed the barbarians only four weeks before, thinking of them as heroes of the resistance, men of force and action who would straighten out the eternal quarrels and talk talk talk around the Athenian café tables. So the quarrels were straightened out, and corpses lay in the streets. I remember what a Greek reporter said, I can’t forget it: “It is not only bodies lying in the gutters. It is not only people who have been mutilated with axes or torn to pieces by human hands. It is also our beliefs and our pride. A Greek does not enjoy the taste of shame in his mouth.” The Greek didn’t enjoy saying that, either. But it is only the civilised who can feel the taste of shame. A barbarian wouldn’t even know what it was...
    I’m getting too serious? You know, I just can’t raise a smile over barbarians. And what is a barbarian, you ask? A man dressed in skins? Not in this century, friend. He’s the type who likes to destroy. That’s all. He wants to be boss-man, whether it’s with ahatchet or a gun or a bomb, or with nice cold-eyed justifications such as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” As if we were only something laid by a clucking hen for breakfast.
    Strang’s lips tightened. He stared