Lull

The silence was startling. For the first time in five nightmare weeks there was no fighting in Athens.

Tommies in tanks had recaptured the ruins of the Averoff prison which ELAS had used as a fort. After it fell, resistance collapsed. With all but a third of the capital recaptured, reinforced British troops prepared to drive out the remnant of ELAS forces. In driblets ELAS riflemen retreated by winding paths over the hills and melted away into the countryside. Into the streets, behind them, marched British troops and Greek Government Militia, pelted by flowers from shattered windows. Said a perplexed Tommy: "Blimey, I'll never get the hang of these people. First flowers, then bombs, then flowers again."

After the soldiers came the civilians. They picked their way through ruins and roadblocks, in search of food ,and firewood. In the first days of peace, soup kitchens served 320,000 meals to hungry Athenians. Against the wall of a hotel an old man leaned as though asleep. He had been dead five days.

Peace by Force. Peace had been won not by the truce which the British had offered ELAS, but by military force. In a pronouncement as stiff as his mustachios, Greece's new Premier, General Nicholas Plastiras, 62, brusquely warned ELAS that they had better capitulate politically too.

Greece had chosen a Regent,* Archbishop Damaskinos (TIME, Jan. 8). The Archbishop chose as Premier Greece's No. 1 kingbreaker, fresh from eleven years of exile in, France. Some Greeks were pleased. They remembered Plastiras as the democratic strongman who helped depose King Constantine in 1922, King George II the following year. Other Greeks were disappointed. They remembered Plastiras' unsuccessful attempt to seize the Government in 1933.

Disarmament First. In his nine-man Cabinet, Plastiras took the four portfolios of War, Navy, Air and Merchant Marine in addition to the Premiership. Most of his Ministers were Liberals; all but one had rightist traditions. The exception: Foreign Minister John Sofianopoulos, 57, who organized Greece's Popular Front party in 1936, visited Russia in 1924 at the invitation of the Russian Government. Not in the Government: representatives of EAM (National Liberation Front), whose fighting arm is ELAS. Places were presumably still open for them.

But General Plastiras made his attitude crystal-clear: ELAS must first lay down its arms before EAM could enter his Government. Thereafter he promised: 1) re-establishment of democratic institutions, 2) free elections. He added grimly: "I hope the rebellion will end with the rebels laying down their arms . . . trusting my word that I will not allow a dictatorship. ... If not, I will naturally be compelled to clear the situation by force." Leftish Foreign Minister Sofianopoulos 'backed his leader; ELAS was a minority, must lay down its arms.

But ELAS showed no intention of doing so. It was still fighting fiercely at Patras, chief port of Western Greece. It was believed to control most of Greece. ELAS' withdrawal from Athens looked more & more like a strategic retreat. Liberated Athens looked like a Government-controlled island in a sea of ELAS hostility. There was a lull. But dirty weather might blow up again at any moment.

*The regency idea was spreading. Last week King Peter of Yugoslavia was reportedly considering a regency council, on British urging. King Zog of Albania, whom nobody had urged, offered to accept one for Albania.

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