GREECE: If We Hold Fast . . .

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War is a bad thing: but to submit to the dictation of other states is worse. Freedom, if we hold fast to it, will ultimately restore our losses, but submission will mean permanent loss of all that we value. . . . To those of you who call yourselves men of peace, I say: You are not safe unless you have men of action at your side.—Thucydides.

Modern Greeks needed such a man of action—who "restrained the multitudes while respecting their liberties." The man of action they got—Archbishop Da-maskinos (rhymes with "seen us"), Regent of Greece—returned last week to Athens after a busy fortnight in London and Paris.

Journey to the West. For him, for Greece and for the western world, it had been an interesting trip. The British had given him his first journey by air. In London he had talked with Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, the U.S.'s Jimmy Byrnes, and his exiled sovereign, George II. Thanks to the hostility of Viacheslav Molotov, the bearded statesman of Athens had been excluded from the sessions of the Council of Foreign Ministers (see INTERNATIONAL). But he had made his presence felt in London; he had dramatized the pivotal position of his country in the new geopolitics of the Mediterranean.

The Archbishop had also made a social stir. Tall (6 ft. 4 in.) and full of dignity, berobed in the black garb and silver chain ofj his churchly office, he cut a figure unique among modern statesmen. He impressed London hostesses by his great appetite for oriental pilaff (his aides cornered the dwindling London rice stocks), his fine Greek cigarets, the quantities of boiling Turkish coffee he consumed. He rode majestically through London's streets in a Rolls-Royce provided by the British Government. Finally, again by air, he had flown off to Paris and a royal Gallic welcome. Then, tired and rather wan, he had once more stepped into a plane and returned to Athens and his troubled people.

Born in Blood. No people in the postwar world had longed more for freedom; none had so endangered their liberties in their bloody efforts to win it. As Regent and Archbishop, Damaskinos was at once the product and the personification of the efforts and the dangers.

He was born of peasants, 54 years ago. in the brown hills of Thessaly, and he was one of 13 children. The old people of his town, Dobvitsa, still remember his huge boyhood appetite, and his way of wandering alone in the mountains. They tell a story of how he came to the church and, through it, to power.

One day, passing one of the many monasteries which cling to those hillsides, he paused before a picture of the Virgin. He put his last coin in the offering box, there & then resolved to enter the Greek Orthodox priesthood. An uncle, a well-to-do priest, shepherded him through the schools of Karditsa, where he excelled as a wrestler and javelin thrower.

The young man's thoughts were not solely of God: he studied law as well as theology at the University of Athens. In 1918, the year after he took holy orders, he achieved his first political triumph: an agreement resolving the nationalist quarrels of the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian monks who inhabit ancient, revered Mount Athos.