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telegram from Rome began to arrive at the legation. The Italian staff members deciphering it stopped now and then, their faces pale, to mingle with the Greek guests so that nothing would seem amiss. The message was an ultimatum which the horrified Grazzi was to deliver to Metaxas, demanding that Italian troops be allowed to occupy his country.
    At three o’clock on the morning of October 28 Grazzi woke up Metaxas, who received him in dressing gown and slippers, and handed him the ultimatum. Mussolini had given the Greek prime minister three hours to reply. The two men spoke in French. Metaxas’ hands trembled as he looked up from the paper and rejected the ultimatum with the words
“Alors, c’est la guerre!”
    Popular legend has condensed Metaxas’ refusal into the single word
“Ochi!”
(“No!”), which has become a Greek battle cry that blooms defiantly every October 28 on walls throughout Greece. It is permanently emblazoned in ten-foot-high letters of white stone on a peak of the Mourgana range above a small village called Lia in the northwestern corner of Greece, just below the Albanian border.
    But Mussolini didn’t wait for Metaxas’ reply. Before the ultimatum had expired, five heavily armed divisions of Italian soldiers began moving from Albania over the border into Greece.

I T WAS DURING the little summer of St. Demetrios in 1940 that Eleni Gatzoyiannis attended the disinterment of the bones of her mother-in-law, Fotini Gatzoyiannis, in the village of Lia.
    Eleni had lived with Fotini for almost ten years, from the day she was brought to the woman’s home as a nineteen-year-old bride by Fotini’s fifth son, Christos. She had held her mother-in-law’s hand when she died, worn out by eighty-four years of life and the birth of nine children. Five years had passed since Fotini’s death and it would not be easy to watch the bones taken from the earth, washed and stored in the church ossuary, but in Greece, even in a mountain village of 787 people, grave plots were few and could be occupied only temporarily.
    When Eleni led her children to the burial ground behind the Church of St. Demetrios, in the shade of the giant cypress trees, the professional mourners were already there, clucking sociably like a flock of crows. Soon they would be ripping the bosoms of their dresses, throwing dirt on their heads and weaving the story-songs of Fotini’s life into dirges that could raise the hair on a heathen’s scalp.
    Father Zisis, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, joined the mourners, making the sign of the cross. Eleni picked up a shovel, for it was the duty of the closest relatives to dig up the corpse. Her brother-in-law Foto Gatzoyiannis did the same. He was the only one of Fotini’s children who was not dead or too far away to return.
    Eleni handed the baby boy, Nikola, to her eldest daughter, Olga, twelve, who balanced him on one hip, clearly bored with the ceremony. Alexandra, eight, called by the village nickname “Kanta,” had refused to come at all. Kanta was a nervous, superstitious child who hid in the outhouse, hands pressed over her ears, at the first death knell of the church bells. The sight of a corpse would leave her screaming in her sleep for weeks.
    Fat, flaxen-haired Glykeria, six, was the opposite, pushing to the front, eager for the first glimpse of her grandmother’s skeleton. Whether it wasa wedding, a funeral, a traveling shadow-puppet show or the mating of the family ram to a neighbor’s ewe, Glykeria, with her impish eyes and angel hair, was always in the front row. In her excitement, Glykeria had forgotten to look after her little sister, Fotini, two, who now sat deserted on a grave nearby where she was screwing up her face for a wail of misery.
    The survivors began to dig and the mourners lifted their keening voices, inspiring one another to ever greater displays of poetry and grief:
    Where are you,
Kyria
Fotini,
     where did the worms lead you?
Leaving your sons and