Before December fighting

Days pass by quickly, weeks reach the end of the year, but the waters of the great river don't flow. Athens is continually in a ferment that nobody has the power to pacify. By and by the agitation takes concrete form and becomes a battle, and whether you call it ideology or tough politics you are not far wrong. Everybody talks clearly now because everybody sees clearly now. They clearly see the most difficult hour coming, the hour of implacable account that no country can avoid when it has lived under a yoke and has written in the big book of slavery the names of those who were most in pain but did not have the guts to fight, those who stood up to the conqueror, took a rifle and took to the mountains, and those who betrayed in some way and have no future under the sun of the tortured country. This big book of slavery, which remained closed for almost four years, has opened now. And those who know how to read can see the new blood that will be shed and the new struggle that will start and may become the blackest, most blood-stained page in the history of the country.

(Petros Charis, Imeres Orgis (Dekemvris 1944), Athens, Estia, 1992, pp. 19-20)