Chapter 29
I went back to Trípolis and I reported to Lýras. A verbal report on what I saw during my one and only leave of absence. All that sordidness. In Ayios Pétros the men from Máni and the men from Corinth almost killed each other. We had a battalion of men from Corinth. They’d swiped someone’s watch, and he went and asked for it. He was the uncle or the grandfather of an officer. And he asked for the watch, and the watch was found. In the meantime they began fighting in the main square of Ayios Pétros. With the ELAS rebels right there above us. Right above us. Just looking for a chance to cut us up. I went and explained everything to Lýras. He tells me, All this can you please report it in writing, everything, from the time you went to Astros, whatever you saw? I went and wrote up a report. What the general picture was, the unruliness and the corruption. The sordidness. A situation you couldn’t control. Because of course various other forces were coming into play. A strange group of people, the down-and-out. Some of them embittered, others on the run, others, like the men from Máni, who have it in their blood, for example. At any rate. The Allied landing came soon afterward, and Kanellópoulos disembarked in the Peloponnese.