Glimpses of a Battlefront

Within the borders of Greece, nothing happened last week so important to the country's future as what went on in the minds of men in Moscow, Belgrade and Washington (see INTERNATIONAL). There was war in Greece; but at the suddenly historic town of Konitsa the fighting had subsided. TIME Correspondent Mary Barber pushed into the town, sent her cable in short "takes":

Cable 34:

Approaching Konitsa, a few shells passed overhead as we bumped along in a Canadian-built truck which the makers would not have recognized, there was so much wire and string holding it together. We lost count of the mine craters and dead disemboweled mules along the roadside.

Cable 36:

Riding up in a truck's cab was black-robed, white-bearded Bishop Evlogios of Koritza--a town in Albania which the Greeks maintain ought to be theirs. The bishop agrees. Again & again the column halted to let the bishop scramble out and bless passing soldiers.

Suddenly, at one of these halts, a blue Ford station wagon hove in sight, coming down from Konitsa. Out of it tripped a hatless, trim figure of a girl wearing woolen stockings, bobby-sox, a grey, fur-trimmed coat with an emerald bracelet peeping from the sleeve. "Hail, Boubou-lina!" bellowed the bishop.* The girl was Greece's blue-eyed, curly-haired, blonde Queen Frederika.

She had overruled the commanding general of the 8th Mountain Division, who had told correspondents: "She will not go to Konitsa. She may be queen, but I am king up here." Frederika was the first to cross the shell-blasted bridge to Konitsa after the engineers had repaired it.

Cable 38:

The first impression of Konitsa, as we bumped into the main square at the foot of the town, was that the shellfire had not done much damage. The houses are solid affairs built of grey stone with ivy and moss growing on the eternally damp walls. The shells merely seemed to have chipped their Turkish-built solidity.

Cable 40:

As night fell, the shellfire began again, but this time it was the Greek guns firing out of the town on rebel positions high in the mountains to the northeast.

Cable 42:

The only U.S. supplies that the troops at Konitsa have seen are G.I. rations. Said one muleteer: "Those rations are all right if you've got to eat them, as we had to during a siege; but, don't misunderstand me, Miss, to tell you the truth, they are not our kind of food. Even my mule Nickola would not eat that corn."

The soldiers demanded guns of me as if I had them in my bedroll. "Please, Miss," said Evangelos Doutis, "are the Americans going to help us or let us go under? Please tell Mr. Truman we want to know which, and quickly."

Doutis said his fiancee's 90-year-old grandfather had been beaten to death; she herself had fled from her village, and her dowry was seized. This was an important matter, because it is tough to marry when there is no dowry.

Cable 44:

Brown-eyed Dimitri Kutseos, 16-year-old rebel guerrilla, was one of 40 captured in the battle at Konitsa. Dressed in a grey-green Rumanian military tunic, as were many of his comrades, he looked a sad little figure. Colonel Valadas, commanding the Loyalists in Konitsa, remarked: "When you catch them they say they were forcibly recruited; but when they fight, they fight like hell."

Dimitri came from Domokos near Lamia. He was drafted by the guerrillas last summer. He sometimes grumbled at walking--for it's a long way from Lamia to Albania and back.

"One day the captain," said Dimitri, "decided to make an example of me before the others. He had me hung by the legs, head downwards, over a brazier of coals."

The rebel squad was armed in Albania specially for the Konitsa attack with the Panzerfaust (a German-type bazooka) and Rumanian mines. Three of Dimitri's friends from Lamia tried to run away from the guerrilla band. "They were caught," said Dimitri, "and tied with ropes and the oldtimers came and kicked them to death before us in the light of the moon."

Konitsa would be an easy job, the captain assured his squad. "He told us our government would be set up and we would push on to Ioannina. There we would find the Anglo-American commission. We were to take them prisoner, tie them up, and take their clothes away," Dimitri explained. The "Anglo-American commission" seemed to mean the field team from the U.N. Balkan committee.

Cable 46:

Konitsa's Loyalist Colonel Valadas seemed to think that United Nations support was more of a hindrance than a help. "We are fighting this war with our hands tied," he complained. "Our soldiers are not allowed to get closer than two kilometers to the Albanian border, but we have to take losses from shellfire from guns across the frontier. We have to wait for the U.N. people to come and look through their field glasses and scribble down a note. That's a hell of a way to fight a war."

*The bishop referred to a famous heroine of the Greek War of Independence in the 18203. After her husband was captured and executed by the Turks, Lascarina Bouboulina replaced him as a sea raider, took command of his ship and effectively harried Turkish shipping in the Aegean.

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