Unsurprisingly, the Greek army's combat strength was nothing special, but dealing with a disorganized rabble fighting on their own was no problem.
Once the riots had been successfully quelled, George I felt both joy and sorrow. He was glad that he had finally kept his throne, but grieved that the Greeks had paid far too heavy a price this time and would be unable to recover their vitality for a long while.
Even hundreds of thousands of pigs would not be easy to catch, much less people.
Relying on the weapons left behind by the Ottomans, the *** stranded in Greece rose up in resistance. Even if they could not defeat the Greek army, could they not bully the Greek civilians?
They felt no pressure at all about burning, killing, looting, and plundering. Already adrift in a foreign land, the *** had been full of pent-up fury. The Ottomans had previously kept them under control, leaving them no outlet to vent it; now that those restraints were gone, they naturally acted without the slightest scruple.
Then the Greek civilians suffered another calamity. By the time the chaos was completely suppressed, it was already 1898.
The Greek Peninsula's economy had utterly collapsed. Vast numbers of homes had been burned down, huge stretches of farmland abandoned, countless Greek civilians slaughtered beneath the butcher's blade, and hundreds of thousands left homeless and in desperate need of relief.
Seeing the Greek government's emergency response, Ferdinand could not help admiring George I's methods.
Not only had he successfully diverted the contradictions and eliminated hidden dangers, but the government had also gained hundreds of thousands of free laborers, easing the shortage of manpower for Greece's postwar reconstruction.
Just as Ferdinand was worrying that the Greeks might rise again, George I did something else that stunned everyone.