David Crane - Lord Byron’s Jackal - A Life of Trelawny

No one could end it. An order went out to stop the killing. It was ignored. A second order went out from Colocotrones that there should be no killing within the town’s walls, but that too was useless. Not even the dead were safe. Tombs were ransacked, bodies exhumed, fuel to the contagion that was the inevitable aftermath of siege.

Perhaps, though, the worst crime was still to come. After the first attack something between two and three thousand inhabitants, mainly women and children, were taken out and held in the Greek camp at the foot of the hills. On 8 October they were stripped naked, and herded into a narrow gorge just to the west of the town. It was a perfect killing field the attackers had chosen for their business, sealed off at one end so there could be no escape, its grey limestone walls streaked with red as if the rocks themselves bled in sympathy. There are no descriptions of what happened that day, but a week later the Scottish Philhellene and historian, Thomas Gordon, passed the scene on his way back to the Ionian Isles. He was never able to bring himself to write of it in his great history of the war, but while serving out his quarantine in the lazar house on Cephalonia he told the English doctor – a Doctor Thomson, whose report made its way back through Sir Thomas Maitland to London – what he had seen. The corpses lay where they had been butchered, ‘the bodies of pregnant women were ripped open, their bodies dreadfully mangled, their heads struck off and placed on the bodies of dogs, whilst the dogs heads were placed on theirs, and also upon their private parts.’ 23

There are towns and places which seem to remain the same through every change, as if there is some indestructible genius about them, some essence that will reassert itself like a damp mould through every disguise. It is perhaps nothing more than fancy that finds an echo of these horrors among the hills that squat so balefully above the modern town, and yet in the way Tripolis subverts history to the triumphalism of a national myth, we are brought as close as landscape or place can take us to the Greece of 1821.

With the bombast of its civic statuary, with the tyres, rubbish and broken-down trucks that mix with the brittle bones in that nearby gorge, Tripolis is even now a litmus test of sensibility that is not easy to fail and it is a sobering thought that in Trelawny’s account it merits only a casual half-line. It is often as worth noting what a man omits of his experience as what he includes, and Trelawny’s silence here – so different from Gordon’s – seems as eloquent as anything he wrote, an involuntary revelation of the man himself, a sudden glimpse into a moral abyss all the more chilling because he was too blind to try to hide it.

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