The 34th Degree

20

H is decision to drop out of Harvard and enroll in the United States Military Academy even before America entered the war would have shocked his American friends and relatives-had he told them. But Chris Andros felt it was his duty to uphold the honor of his family’s name, a name that to Greeks was synonymous with war and greatness.

Chris Andros was named after his great-great-grandfather, a legendary merchant skipper of the Greek islands during the war of independence. A master in the saltwater sport of fireboating, the old sea dog would approach Turkish warships at night in dispensable vessels packed with gunpowder, pitch, and sulfur. Once they were close enough, he and his crew would light the powder train, cast off in their longboat, and enjoy the fireworks from a distance. His end came at Missolonghi. Surrounded by Turks, he and the remaining defenders set fire to the ammunition stores and blew themselves up, taking their enemies with them. This act propelled an inspired Anglo-French fleet to sink the Turkish navy in the Battle of Navarino in 1827 and thus secure the birth of modern Greece.

Chris’s great-grandfather Byron and, later, his grandfather Basil built the Andros Shipping dynasty, chiefly through hard work and fortuitous marriages that consolidated some of Greece’s most prosperous shipping lines. On rare occasions they engaged in smuggling, not for money but on principle, sending arms to those who fought for freedom in various parts of the world. Eventually, his uncle Dimitri brought the family’s business to America, anchoring Andros Shipping West in Boston Harbor.

His father, Nicholas, however, chose a different path. He shunned the family trade altogether and, against the wishes of Basil, chose to train at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin as a military officer. Inspired by the idea of a greater Greece, he returned to Athens to take his commission in the Hellenic Royal Army. But to make peace with Basil, he announced that he would take Anastasia Rassious of the Rassious shipping family as his wife.

Chris Andros never knew his mother. At the time she was carrying him, the Great War had broken out across Europe. King Constantine, defying the Greek people and the Allies, decided to support his German brother-in-law, the kaiser. With the Greek government on the brink of collapse and civil war looming, Nicholas sent Anastasia to America to stay with Dimitri and his cousins. By the time Chris was born in 1917 in a Boston hospital, Greece had sided with America and the Allies against the Germans and was suffering the ravages of war. One month later, the ocean liner on which Chris and his mother were sailing was sunk by a German submarine. Anastasia died in the icy waters of the Atlantic, but Chris was plucked alive from the hungry waves.

God, how he hated the Germans.

After the Allied victory, he was returned to Greece-a grim reminder of his mother to his father, Colonel Nicholas Andros, and an answered prayer to Basil, who already had decided that Chris would one day take the helm of Andros Shipping in Greece.

Grandfather Basil made sure Chris’s education started early, bringing a British governess to the family’s estate in Kifissia. From Miss Robinson, he learned to read Shakespeare, Milton, and, in her weaker moments, American authors such as Mark Twain. Especially inspiring were the speeches of President Woodrow Wilson, whose call for a League of Nations captivated Chris’s young mind with its vision of a new world order governed not by violence but by an open understanding of the rights of all nations, the small as well as the mighty, to determine their own destinies. Above all, from Miss Robinson, he learned of the glory that was ancient Greece and of the country’s contributions to European civilization.

Even as a boy, he could sense that the modern Greek nation paled before its ancient glories. A simple drive from his northern suburb of Kifissia to the docks of Piraeus to see the family ships proved that much. Passing through the hot, winding, tortuous streets of Athens, he couldn’t help but notice the ramshackle storefronts, refugees, and street children, even though Nasos the driver took pains to stay on the main boulevards. As for Greece’s place in the world, Nicholas said the country was prized only for its strategic position in the Mediterranean and would forever remain the pawn of world powers unless it seized the initiative to become a great state.

Nicholas tried to do just that with what became known as the Great Idea-Greece’s ill-fated quest to invade Turkey and reestablish a new Byzantium, with Constantinople as its capital. The Hellenic Royal Army came within sixty miles of Ankara before the tide of battle turned and they were routed. It was only by the grace of God, Nicholas later said, that he and his troops eluded the bloodthirsty Hadji Azrael, whose legions of holy warriors decapitated thousands of Greek stragglers. The Great Idea thus became Greece’s greatest military defeat in centuries. Nicholas returned to Athens only to see the Greek prime minister, commander in chief, and other senior government officials tried and shot for their failure. His father barely escaped trial himself, and the country fell into political turmoil.

From then on, his father, now General Andros, was a nervous man, caught between coup and countercoup. Because Nicholas favored a Greek republic based on American-style democracy, he was accused by royalists of being a republican. Republicans in turn accused him of being a royalist because of his belief that the Greek people should first prove themselves capable of establishing a stable government, strong military, and modern economy before they spent endless hours debating the role of the king. “Better to make the monarchy irrelevant before we depose it,” Chris’s father used to tell him.

Chris didn’t much like King George II. The man wasn’t even Greek but a Dane, an unemployed European monarch whose royal family had been assigned to Greece by the Great Powers sixty years earlier. The Greeks had rejected their first monarch, young King Otto of the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach. Chris thought they should do the same with the House of Oldenburg. Greece was for the Greeks.

Chris had mixed feelings about his father. He admired the man, even though he was something of a fascist, dealing ruthlessly with those who represented “security threats” in Greece. But Chris resented his father’s legacy. Being the son of General Andros was the worst of all worlds. Family friends would compare him to his father and invariably find him lacking. Meanwhile, political enemies would confuse him with his father’s fascism. They would threaten him in order to even old scores with Nicholas or attempt to convert him to their self-aggrandizing politics in order to embarrass his father.

By the time he was twelve, Chris Andros despised the intrigues of Greek politics, having visited his cousins in America for the first time and come back with the realization that the outside world offered a saner, more pleasant existence-in particular, baseball, jazz, and blondes, all of which were rare commodities in Athens. So the next year, after the death of Basil, who had spoiled him rotten and whom he adored, Chris persuaded his father to allow him to attend a preparatory school in America. That way, he reasoned, he could escape his father’s legacy and become his own man.

He had met her at a dance one summer night in Athens when he was home from school on vacation: Aphrodite Vasilis. She was the daughter of a wealthy tobacco merchant-an Andros Shipping client, in fact-and the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Eyes of amber, hair shining black, and a soft mouth that simply begged to be kissed outside under the moon and mango trees. That she was Greek only added to her value in his eyes.

She had so completely turned his head that even life in America couldn’t compare with her company, and he made every excuse to come home to visit his father during school breaks. It was a magical time in his life, despite the arrival of the Depression in America and the regime known as the Fourth of August in Greece. Even he had to admit that under the dictator Metaxas, some stability had returned to Greece. Andros Shipping flourished under the leadership of his uncle Mitchell Rassious; his father found some fulfillment in modernizing the Greek army with German weapons; and his own love for Aphrodite cast a spell of enchantment over his adolescent years.

Finally, in the summer of 1939, after his first year at Harvard, it was her turn to visit him, and together they went to New York for the World’s Fair. They wandered through the effervescent architecture of the futuristic exhibition buildings, astounded at demonstrations of a new medium called television, 3-D movies, and other visions of the World of Tomorrow. The Futurama exhibit in the General Motors Building particularly fascinated Andros as their comfortable electrically driven chairs took them on a simulated airplane flight across the future America of 1960, crisscrossed by an intricate highway network carrying thousands of automobiles. “This highway thing will never work in Greece,” he told her afterward. “Too many mountains. I can assure my uncle Mitchell our shipping business is safe for now.”

With America coming out of the Depression and the arrival of such modern high technology, life seemed to open up before Andros. For here was American optimism, a bright future and the woman of his dreams to share it with. The ominous thunder of war rumbling across Europe seemed so far away. Standing there before the fair’s trademark spike-and-ball centerpiece-the soaring six-hundred-foot Trylon and great geospheric Perisphere-with the glittering Manhattan skyline as a backdrop, he asked Aphrodite to marry him. She replied with an enthusiastic yes, and they pledged their unwavering loyalty to each other.

Andros said, “I promise I’ll come back to Greece with a ring.”

But he never came back.

War broke out again in Europe, and a glory-hungry Mussolini, unwilling to remain in Hitler’s shadow, issued Metaxas an ultimatum to surrender without a fight. Metaxas hardly had time to utter his famous retort of “No!” before Italian forces in Albania advanced into Greece in overwhelming numbers. The Greek army, led by Field Marshal Papagos and General Andros, then stunned the world by driving Il Duce’s illustrious eight million bayonets back into Albania. Only Hitler’s intervention the next spring could rescue Mussolini. No match for the overwhelming force of the modern German war machine, the Greeks, even with the help of the British Expeditionary Forces, were crushed in a matter of six weeks. General Andros, who resolved to fight to the finish, died with his men on the island of Crete, but not before destroying five thousand German paratroopers in the bloodiest fighting of the war. That was of little comfort to Chris, however, who had lost his father and found himself alone in America, powerless to help and tortured with regret. Haunting him was the sense that he wasn’t there when his father, fiancee, and country had needed him most, and in missing that one crucial moment of his life, he had missed it all.

God, how he hated the Germans.

Cut off from Greece and Aphrodite by the war, cut off from his father forever, he did the only thing he could to restore any sense of honor to himself. Though America was officially neutral at the time, he asked a certain U.S. senator-who was indebted to Andros Shipping-to nominate him to West Point. One month later, he swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States with his life. Three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America declared war on the Axis.

As in previous wars, the U.S. Military Academy reduced the length of its course to three years. Together with his academic credit from Harvard and his outstanding demonstration of skills in military and physical training, Andros rose to the top of his class by May 1943. At last, Andros felt, he had made something of himself. No longer was he simply a privileged heir to a Greek shipping dynasty. Now he was a second lieutenant in the United States Army. He had earned the respect of his peers, his superiors, and, most important, himself. Come June, he would graduate for assignment to combat duty, most likely to join the force long rumored to be gathering for an invasion of Europe.

Andros dreamed of landing with the Allies in Greece. He would lead his U.S. Army troops off their transports in Piraeus, vanquish the fleeing Nazis, and liberate Athens. Yes, what his father had begun in the valiant defense of Crete, he would finish by returning to Greece a conquering hero.

Now that dream was dead.