The rout in Asia Minor had its repercussion in Greece. For nearly two years the people, though war-worn and on the edge of bankruptcy, bore the financial as they had borne the famine blockade, trusting that England would at any moment come forth to counter the vindictiveness of France, and sturdily resisted all the efforts of the Venizelist party to shake the stability of the Royalist regime: Constantine again appeared in their eyes as a victim of the Cretan's intrigues. But the loss of Ionia and the danger of the loss of Thrace; the horror and {235} despair arising from the sack of Smyrna, whence shiploads of broken refugees fled to the Greek ports; all this, reinforced by an idea that the maintenance of the King on the throne prevented the effective expression of British friendship and his fall would remove French hostility, created conditions before which questions of personalities for once faded into insignificance, and put into the hands of M. Venizelos's partisans an irresistible lever.
On 26 September an army of 15,000 insurgent soldiers landed near Athens and demanded the abdication of the King. The loyal troops were ready to meet force by force. But the King, in order to avert a fratricidal struggle which would have dealt Greece the finishing stroke, forbade opposition and immediately abdicated, "happy," as he said, "that another opportunity has been given me to sacrifice myself once more for Greece." In fact, once more Constantine was made the scape-goat for disasters for which he was in no way responsible—disasters from which he would undoubtedly have saved his country, had he been allowed to pursue his own sober course.
M. Venizelos would not go back to Athens until the excitement subsided, lest people should think, he said, that he had had any part in the revolution: but undertook the defence of the national interests in the Entente capitals. His mission was to obtain such support as would enable him to save Greece something out of the ruin which his insane imperialism had brought upon her, so that he might be in a position to point out to his countrymen that he alone, after the disastrous failure of Constantine, had been able to secure their partial rehabilitation. That accomplished, he might then hope to become a perpetual Prime Minister or President.
France made it quite clear that no changes in Greece could alter her policy: however satisfied she might be at the second disappearance of the antipathetic monarch, it should not be supposed that, even were a Republic to be set up, presided over by the Great Cretan, her attitude on territorial questions would be transformed: Thrace, after Ionia, must revert to Turkey. French statesmen longed for the complete demolition of their own handiwork. M. Poincaré, in 1922, was proud to do what the Duc de Broglie ninety years before scoffed at as an {236} unthinkable folly: "Abandonner la Grèce aujourd'hui, détruire de nos propres mains l'ouvrage que nos propres mains ont presque achevé!"
England's expressed attitude was not characterized by a like precision. It is true that after the Greek debacle she dispatched ships and troops to prevent the Straits from falling into the hands of the Turks; but in the matter of Thrace she had already yielded to France: and how the restoration of Turkish rule in Europe can be reconciled with the freedom of the Straits remains to be seen.
What the future may have in store for Greece and Turkey is a matter of comparatively small account. What is of great and permanent importance is the divergence between the paths of France and England revealed by the preceding analysis of events.
From this analysis have been carefully excluded such superficial dissensions as always arise between allies after a war, and were especially to be expected after a war in which every national susceptibility was quickened to a morbid degree: they belong to a different category from the profound antagonisms under consideration. These—whatever the philosopher may think of a struggle for domination—present a problem which British statesmen must face frankly. It is not a new problem; but it now appears under a new form and in a more acute phase than it has ever possessed in the past—thanks to the success of the "knock-out blow" policy which governed the latter stages of the War.
With the German power replaced by the French, the Russian for the moment in abeyance, French and Italian influences competing in Turkey, French and British aims clashing in the Arab regions wrested from Turkey—while indignation at Occidental interference surges in the minds of all the peoples of the Orient—the Eastern Mediterranean offers a situation which tempts one to ask whether the authors of that policy have not succeeded too well? Whether in pursuing the success of the day—to which their personal reputations were attached—they did not lose sight of the morrow? Whether they have not scattered the seed without sufficiently heeding the crop? However that may be, unless this situation was clearly foreseen by its creators and provided for—a hypothesis {237} which, with the utmost goodwill towards them, does not appear very probable—they have an anxious task—a task that, under these conditions, demands from British statesmanship more thinking about the Near Eastern question and the Greek factor in it than was necessary before 1914.
As a first aid to an appreciation of the problem by the public—which the present crisis found utterly unprepared—it would have been well if the fundamental differences between the respective attitudes of France and England towards each other and towards the peoples concerned had been candidly acknowledged, and all pretence of Franco-British co-operation in the Near East abandoned. Lasting co-operation cannot be where there is neither community of interests nor consonance of ideas: where the loss of one party is welcomed as gain by the other, and the wisdom of the one in the eyes of the other is folly. Pious talk of a common Allied mission in the Near East has only served to obscure issues and to render confusion in the public mind worse confounded. It was idle to make a mystery of the support given by France to the Turks and of her insistence on the revision of the Sèvres Treaty—preliminary steps to her demand for the evacuation of Chanak and the consequent elimination of British sea-power. The object of these tactics was evident to every serious student of history: France pursues now the plan laid down by Louis XIV, continued by Napoleon, fitfully carried on throughout the nineteenth century, and facilitated by her installation in Syria—the equivalent of the German Drang nach Osten: a plan incompatible with the safety of the British Empire in the East. This is the truth of the matter, and nothing has been gained by hiding it.
The people who fought a ruinous war without quite knowing the ends aimed at, had a right to know at least the results obtained; and after France's separate agreement with Turkey, the denial to them of any part of that knowledge could not be justified on any principle of honour or plea of expediency.