"Are these your arguments, gentlemen?" asked the King, as he received them. Amid the general consternation, he alone maintained his calmness.
The conference went on to the accompaniment of whistling and bursting shells, and at 7 o'clock ended in an agreement, whereby Admiral Dartige consented to stop hostilities and accept the King's offer of six mountain batteries, in lieu of the ten he had demanded; the Entente Ministers undertaking to recommend to their Governments the abandonment of his other demands.
There ensued an exchange of prisoners, and the retreat of the Allies to their ships during the night, followed next day by the detachment quartered at the Zappeion, and all the controllers of police, posts, telegraphs, telephones, and railways. Many of the ruffians in the pay of the Franco-British Secret Services anticipated this evacuation by slipping out of the capital which they had terrorized for nearly a year.
And so the pacific demonstration was over, having cost the Greeks 4 officers and 26 men killed, and 4 officers and 51 men wounded. The Allied casualties were 60 killed, including 6 officers, and 167 wounded.
For the rest, no epithet was less applicable to the affair than that of "Athenian Vespers," with which the Parisian press christened it. Admiral Dartige protests indignantly against the grotesque exaggerations of his imaginative compatriots. Apart from the tragic features natural to a pacific demonstration, he declares that the whole drama passed off as pleasantly as a drama could. Not a single Allied subject was ill-treated. Not one shot was fired on the Legations of the Entente Powers, whose Ministers and nationals, in the midst of it all, incurred only such danger as came from their own shells—shells showered upon an open town. Even the French bluejackets, who had long been a thorn in the very heart of Athens, were conducted back to their proper place under a Greek escort, ingloriously {161} but safely. A like spirit, to a still higher degree, marked the treatment in Greek hospitals of the Allies' wounded, whose rapid recovery, says the Admiral, testified to the care which they received. "We assisted in a civil war: the Royalists struck in our marines the protectors of their political enemies." [18]
It was upon those enemies that Royalist wrath satiated itself. On 2 December, veritable battles took place in many parts of Athens; suspect houses, hotels, offices, and shops being assailed and defended with murderous fury. The house of M. Venizelos, as was fitting, formed the centre of the conflict. Twenty Cretan stalwarts had barricaded themselves in it and held out until machine-guns persuaded them to surrender. Within was discovered a small arsenal of rifles, revolvers, hand-grenades, dynamite cartridges, fuses: among them a bundle of weapons still wrapped in the French canvas in which it had arrived. Tell-tale articles of a similar nature were discovered on the premises of other conspirators, who were led off to prison, pursued by crowds hooting, cursing, spitting at them, so that their escorts had the greatest difficulty in saving them from being lynched. Although not comparable to parallel scenes witnessed by many a Western city under analogous circumstances, the event was an exhibition of human savagery sufficiently ugly in itself: it did not require the legends of massacre and torture with which it was embellished by pious journalists anxious to excite in the Allied publics sympathy for persons whom the Allies' own advance had instigated to violence and their precipitate retreat had exposed to a not unmerited vengeance.[19]
[1] Du Fournet, pp. 188-9.
[2] Du Fournet, pp. 151, 179-80, 182-3, 190-1.
[3] Du Fournet, pp. 195-7.
[4] Zalocostas to the Entente Legations, Athens, 7/20 Nov, 1916.