out that ship, the _Kalkis_?" asked the censor.

"Oh, we shall probably charter her," said the major bitterly. "Take all
the risk and pay him a princely sum for sitting tight here and doing
nothing. We ought to buy, but we won't."

He sat silent for a moment. He was thinking of those men in Phyros,
waiting for their stores, eating sparingly of their emergency rations,
sampling the local cheese and bread and keeping a bright look-out for
transports which were lying on their sides in eighty fathoms. Something
would have to be done at once about them. This Dainopoulos had--here the
major glanced at his shorthand notes--four thousand feet of timber and
the Phyros crowd were frantic for timber for a jetty. Just think of it!
A fertile island which these Greeks had had for a couple of thousand
years, and no jetty yet! What could one do with people like that?
Hopeless. Then there was flour. He simply had to have some flour soon.
Dainopoulos said he had fifteen hundred barrels when the _Kalkis_ came
in.

There was in all this hard thinking no complete view of the war or of
the world. If they could collar stores from some other front or from one
of their allies, it was all one to them. Even the course of events had
no interest for them beyond their own base. This was an inevitable
result of the intensive pressure of responsibility on executives. They
were not callous. They were simply busy. Their own lives were still
bounded by the social barriers of England. They never spoke of private
affairs except to some man of their own class who had been to one of the
great public schools. For them the war was a war to perpetuate this
social hierarchy, to place it once more upon an impregnable base. They
wished to win, they but could see no difference between democracy and
defeat. Even the novelist was a novelist within the radius of his social
sphere, and remained within it in a city of Macedonia. He felt it
incumbent upon him to remain also a gentleman, even at the expense of
valuable collisions with alien temperaments. "He's a Greek, and I loathe
them," summarizes, in the major's words, their collective sentiment. And
their allies, it is to be feared, suffered under this highly specialized
form of criticism. Nothing that happened was adequate to demolish this
formidable _Kultur_. In victory and in defeat it was indestructible.
Only the genius of the race, working in the very strongholds of that
_Kultur_, can split it open and release