CHAPTER XVII

It seems now proper to return to M. Venizelos and to consider in some detail the other measures which he and his patrons at this time adopted for the purpose of consolidating and extending his dominion.

As we have seen, shortly after the Cretan's installation at Salonica, the Entente Powers, by a diplomatic fiction, decided to treat his Committee as a de facto Government. It was not until his countrymen impeached him as a traitor that the recognition assumed a de jure character, by the appointment of duly accredited diplomatic agents to his capital. These steps were accompanied by other marks of sympathy. While the Allies negotiated with the King, their naval commanders canvassed for M. Venizelos—sweeping islands under his sway: Syra was first shepherded into the fold, and a little later the rest of the Cyclades.

A brief suspension of operations supervened as a result of the solemn promise given to Athens that the Allies would neither by land nor by sea allow the extension of the revolutionary movement. For an instant the Entente respected its own pledges. Just before the surrender of the Lambros Cabinet, on 10 January, the Cretan had rushed to establish another accomplished fact by liberating the island of Cerigo; but, on the Government's protest, the Allies obliged him to undo his accomplishment; though, on the plea that the island would resent being replaced under King Constantine's yoke, it was made temporarily autonomous.[1]

Soon, however, these pledges went the way of all words. Between February and May, Cephalonia, Zante, and Corfu {178} were converted one by one: everywhere the apostles from Salonica preaching, "Be our brethren or die of hunger"; and everywhere having behind them the guns of France and England to enforce respect for their gospel. The instance of Leucas, the last of the Ionian Isles to be gathered into the fold, will suffice as an illustration. In the middle of March a French vessel, carrying a consignment of maize, rice, and Venizelist missionaries, called at the island and invited the inhabitants to come, buy, and be saved: they answered that they would never touch food brought by traitors. Towards the end of May, the French Admiral commanding the Ionian Reserve was able to announce that the Leucadian population had joined the National Movement.[2]

To secure his authority over these maritime possessions, the Cretan obtained from his patrons some of the warships of which they had robbed the King.

A similar propaganda was simultaneously going on in the "neutral zone" and in the lands to the south of it—particularly Thessaly—whose immunity from emancipation the Allies had also guaranteed. Only, as this region lay nearer to the base of the Franco-Venizelist Mission, it benefited more severely from its influence. General Sarrail's patrols raided the villages, harrying the peasants and sparing not even the honour of their women. Anyone who knows the Greek peasant's fierce views on feminine chastity can imagine the indignation which such an outrage would have aroused in any case; but in this case their horror was deepened by the circumstance that the assailants sometimes were African semi-savages—the Senegalese whom France brought to Greece, as to other parts of Europe, oblivious of the most rudimentary dictates of decency and sound policy. On one occasion (22 Feb.) the coloured libertines paid for their lust with their lives: a patrol of a dozen of them was surprised and massacred.[3]

Summary executions were among the methods of {179} military tyranny in which General Sarrail rejoiced without scruple and with a certain brutal pride. When once he found himself obliged to justify his conduct, he wrote: "The six inhabitants of Dianitza, who were shot, were Comitadjis. There is no doubt in that respect. Doubt still exists about eight others. If they are proved to be in the same case as the former, they will be shot in the same way. The two men shot at Lourani were put to death because they were known to be Comitadjis. The other two, whose houses were burnt down, are likewise Comitadjis: they would have been shot, if they were not away: they shall be, if they are caught. If a church has been burnt down, it was because it had been transformed into a magazine for arms. If barley has been carried away, it has been paid for or requisitioned." After some more statements of the same enlightening kind, the gallant soldier concludes: "To sum up, the Greek Government organizes bands and maintains them. The security of our Army in the Orient exacts their suppression. I have given orders to put to death all irregulars. These orders have been carried out: they shall continue to be carried out." [4]

It was by precisely similar arguments that General von Bissing justified his severities in Belgium: with this difference, that in Greece the danger never existed. Comitadjis—bands of irregulars—did exist; it would have been strange if the adherents of the King had not done everything to counter the efforts of his enemies. Long before this period the French Secret Service, Admiral Dartige du Fournet tells us, had been busy equipping guerillas on the frontier.[5] Further, in the mainland, as in the islands, the Venizelist recruiting sergeants sought "volunteers" by force: "How many villages had to be surrounded by constabulary. . . . How much shooting had to be done to keep the men of military age from escaping. . . . How many deserters or those unwilling to serve had to be rounded up from hiding places!" exclaims General Sarrail.[6] Some of the recruits thus enlisted snatched at the earliest opportunity of regaining {180} their freedom: they fell in during the day, and at night they fled with their arms.

The assertion that these bands were organized and maintained by the Greek Government to harass the Allies and keep the line of communication with Albania open, with a view to an eventual junction between the forces of King Constantine and those of the German Emperor, rested on evidence which, for some obscure reason, was not produced.[7] But it supplied pretexts for action the true objects of which were not obscure.

Despite his press-gangs, in six months M. Venizelos had only succeeded in sending to the front some 10,000 men. He explained to his Western friends that he had failed to fulfil their expectations better because the neutral zone barred the extension of his movement into Thessaly.[8] He had respected that zone until now; but now that the Allies gave him a free hand over the sea, he saw no longer any reason why they should restrain him on land. Therefore, while the agents from Macedonia goaded the inhabitants to seek rest in apostacy and provoked incidents supplying an excuse for intervention, the advocates of M. Venizelos in Paris and London laboured to clear his way by publishing reports which told how the people of Thessaly prayed for liberation from the yoke of King Constantine,[9] and exhausted their ingenuity in endeavours to show the Entente publics how to break faith with honour and decency, as well as with advantage.

The victualling of the Allied army in Macedonia, always difficult, had become distressingly precarious with its own growth and the growth of the enemy's submarine activity. Were the Allies to go on transporting food and fodder from distant lands across dangerous seas, with the rich cornfields of Thessaly within short and safe reach of their trenches? The seizure of the Thessalian granary, besides {181} helping to keep the Allies in plenty, would help to reduce the Royalists to despair by robbing them of the harvest to which they looked forward with strained eyes and tightened belts. In this wise both military and political problems could be solved by one masterly stroke.

In April, General Sarrail obtained from his Government the orders he had been soliciting since January, to go to Thessaly and seize the crops; only, as the offensive against the Bulgars deprived him of adequate means for the moment, he decided to put off the stroke until the middle of May.[10]

Alarmed by these sudden, though not wholly unexpected, developments, King Constantine dismissed Professor Lambros, and had once more recourse to M. Zaimis; hoping that this statesman, the only non-Venizelist Greek whom the slander of Germanophilism had left untouched, might prove able to placate the Allies. M. Zaimis, as in all previous crises, so now obeyed the call and set himself to discover some path out of the wood (2 May). On the one hand, he opened negotiations with the Entente Ministers; on the other, he tried to bring about a reconciliation with M. Venizelos—the King being understood to be willing to meet the Cretan half-way.

M. Venizelos, on his part, alarmed by the prospect of a rapprochement between Athens and the Entente Powers, set himself, as on all similar occasions, to impugn the Hellenic Government's sincerity. At a signal from the Conductor, all the instruments of the orchestra broke into the familiar chorus. The whole Press of France and England rang again with calumny and fairy-tale. Out they came again in regular sequence and with unvarying monotony: plots and secret letters, weird stories of German intrigue, constant repetition of names compromised or compromising; all ready, cut and dried, for burking any attempt at accommodation that did not include the return and domination of the Great Cretan.

It was maintained that the formation of a Government under M. Zaimis was but a new artifice of King Constantine, adopted at the Kaiser's suggestion, to temporize by ostensibly throwing over a few of his Germanophile favourites. During more than five months he had contrived {182} to checkmate the blockade by drawing on the reserves of food he had laid up at his depots. Now those reserves were exhausted: he needed the Thessalian corn to replenish his magazines, to feed and increase his army, so that in the fullness of time he might bring it out of the Peloponnesus against the Allies.[11]

Even more sinister were the motives which prompted the King's advances to the Cretan. While holding out the right hand to M. Venizelos, Constantine with the left aimed a dagger at his heart: a band of eleven assassins had just been arrested at Salonica on a charge of conspiring to murder him—to murder him in the very midst of his own and his allies' military forces, and under circumstances which made detection certain and escape impossible. Even thus: "their plan was to arrange a banquet to which M. Venizelos would have been invited. They are said to have confessed that they were sent from Athens to kill the Head of the National Government and were promised 4,000 pounds for the murder." [12]

Day by day it became increasingly clear that the question of Thessaly formed only part of the larger question of Greece; that behind the campaign for the crops lurked the conspiracy against the King. A "radical solution" was demanded, on the ground that so long as he reigned at Athens we could not consider Greece a friendly neutral. The Greek organ of M. Venizelos in London now openly described the Cretan as a man sent to heal Hellas of the "dynastic canker," and expressed the opinion that the healing could only be effected by "Prussian methods." [13]

During the whole of May this concert of sophistry and calumny went on: now sinking into low, deadly whispers; now swelling into an uproar that rolled like a mighty, muddy river in flood through every Allied capital, ministering to the inarticulate craving of the public for fresh sensations, thrilling its nerves, and feeding its hate and fear of King Constantine. At the end of the month the curtain went up, and M. Venizelos stepped forward to {188} make the declaration for which his instrumental music had prepared our minds: "I reject all idea of reconciliation firmly, flatly, and finally!"

His confederates and subordinates, as usual, went further: Admiral Coundouriotis: "Neither in this world nor in the next will I have anything to do with King Constantine or his dynasty."

Minister Politis: "No compromise is possible between Liberal Greece and the reigning dynasty."

Minister Averoff: "The one and most important thing is that the dynasty of Constantine should, like the Turks, be turned bag and baggage out of Greece." [14]

So the Great Cretan and his company had given up at last pretending that their plot was not directed against their King, or that they intended to postpone the settlement of their accounts with him till after the War. Their relief must have been proportionate to the strain: it is not hypocrisy, but the need of consistency that harasses a hypocrite. But their outburst of candour was chiefly interesting as an index to the attitude of the Powers from whom they derived their significance.

France had long since made up her mind on the deposition of Constantine, if not indeed on the subversion of the Greek throne. Apart from the hold upon Greece which they would gain by placing her under a ruler created by and consequently dependent on them, French politicians did not lose sight of the popularity which the sacrifice of a king—and that king, too, the Kaiser's brother-in-law—would earn them among their own compatriots. Further, a triumph of French policy over Greece was calculated to obscure in the eyes of the French public the failure of French strategy against Bulgaria: "For me the destruction of Athens the Germanic came second to the struggle against Sofia," wrote General Sarrail[15]; and there were those who believed that his expedition had for its primary objective Athens rather than Sofia.

For a time French politicians had flattered themselves that their aim would be attained by an explosion from within. But it was gradually borne in upon them that the National Movement represented but a small minority {184} of the nation. That truth first became manifest in the summer of 1916, when the demobilization set the Reservists loose—the Reservists upon whom M. Venizelos had miscounted: their verdict was conclusive; for they were drawn from all districts and all classes of the community: the tillers of the plains, the shepherds of the hills, the fishermen who lived by the sea, the traders, the teachers, the lawyers—they represented, in one word, the whole population of military age. The disillusion was furthered by the swift suppression of the seditious attempt on 1 December, and was completed by the Blockade, which demonstrated the solidarity of the nation in a manner that utterly upset the calculations and disconcerted the plans of its authors. Instead of a people ready, after a week or two of privation, to sue for mercy—to revolt against their sovereign and succumb to his rival—the French found in every bit of Old Greece—from Mount Pindus to Cape Malea—a nation nerved to the highest pitch of endurance: prepared to suffer hunger and disease without a murmur, and when the hour should come, to die as those die who possess things they value more than life. This was not what the inventors of the Pacific Blockade contemplated: this was not sport: this was strife—strife of strength with strength.

There was nothing left but force—the danger of creating a new front had been eliminated by the internment of the army, and by the blockade which had succeeded, if not in breaking the spirit of the people, in reducing it to such a state of misery that it now offered a safe subject for attack. M. Ribot, who had replaced M. Briand as Premier and Minister for Foreign Affairs, adopted this "radical solution." He proposed to dispatch to Athens a plenipotentiary charged with the mission of deposing King Constantine, raising M. Venizelos to dictatorial power, and thus establishing the influence of France throughout Greece.

There remained some difficulties of a diplomatic character. Russia had never viewed her ally's uncompromising hostility to King Constantine with enthusiasm. But the French thought that this attitude was due to dynastic ties and monarchic sympathies, and expected the downfall of the Tsar to change it: they could hardly {185} imagine that the Russian Republic would withdraw even that reluctant co-operation in the coercion of Greece which the Russian Empire had accorded; and, at any rate, the voice of a country in the throes of internal disintegration could have little effect upon the march of external events.

The decision really lay between France and England. England's, like Russia's, co-operation hitherto had been but a concession to France. Neither the Foreign Office nor the War Office had ever taken the Salonica Expedition seriously; and both departments would gladly have washed their hands of a business barren of profit and credit alike. But the motives which had impelled London to keep Paris company so far were as potent as ever, and English politicians had hitherto proved themselves so pliant that, provided French pressure continued, the utmost which could be apprehended from them was a feeble show of resistance followed by abject acquiescence. Notwithstanding the moderation England had insisted upon at the Boulogne and Rome Conferences, France had managed to lead her from violence to violence, till this last iniquity, to the logical French mind, seemed inevitable.

[1] Zalocostas to Greek Legations, Paris, London, Rome, Petrograd, 30 Dec./12 Jan.; to Entente Legations, Athens, 19 Jan./1 Feb.; 8/21 March, 1917. For a full and intimate account of this intrigue, somewhat ambitiously styled "The Conquest of Cerigo," see Lawson, pp. 241 foll.

[2] Zalocostas to Greek Ministers abroad, 12/25 March; The Nea Himera, 8/21 March; Exchange Tel., Athens, 16 April, 28 May, 1917.

[3] General Sarrail mentions the punishment (Sarrail, p. 235), but not the provocation. This, together with other atrocities, is the subject of a Note from M. Zalocostas to the French Minister at Athens, 9/22 March, 1917.

[4] Le Temps, 11 April, 1917; Sarrail, pp. 236-7.

[5] Du Fournet, p. 116.

[6] "La Grèce Vénizeliste," in the Revue de Paris, 15 Dec., 1919.

[7] Such a project is only discussed in some of the messages exchanged between Athens and Berlin in December, 1916 (White Book, Nos. 177, 183, 186)—before the definite acceptance of the Allies' terms by the Lambros Cabinet. But there is absolutely nothing to show that the idea ever materialised.

[8] The New Europe, 29 March, 1917.

[9] See telegrams, dated Salonica, 29 March, published in the London Press by the Anglo-Hellenic League; letter from The Times correspondent, dated Syra, 23 April, 1917, etc., etc.

[10] Sarrail, p. 238.

[11] For details of this apocryphal scheme see a report from Salonica, dated 16 May, disseminated by the Anglo-Hellenic League; The Times, 8 and 30 May; the Daily Mail, 9 and 30 May, 1917.

[12] The Times, 14 May, 1917, dispatch dated Salonica 11 May.

[13] The Hesperia, 11, 18, 25 May, 1917.

[14] The Times, 30 May, 1917.

[15] Sarrail, p. 234.

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