Boulogne conference on Greece

On 20 October 1916 the leaders of Great Britain and France met at the Hôtel Impérial in Boulogne-sur-Mer to discuss Eastern affairs, above all their attitude towards Greece. The British chronology of the war places this conference at Calais, but that is a mistake: in its own list of Allied conferences it appears as the Boulogne conference, and so it is given by both British official histories, of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) and of the war at sea (Newbolt), and by the archives of the Pas-de-Calais department. Several earlier Anglo-French meetings, beginning with the first in July 1915, had been held at Calais, which probably explains the mistake.

Who came

The attendance was exceptionally distinguished. On the British side came the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, the foreign secretary, Viscount Grey, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, the war secretary, David Lloyd George, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, and the commander of the British armies in France, General Douglas Haig. France was represented by the prime minister and foreign minister, Aristide Briand, the war minister, General Pierre Roques, the navy minister, Admiral Lucien Lacaze, the finance minister, Alexandre Ribot, the minister without portfolio Léon Bourgeois, the minister of armament, Albert Thomas, and the commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre. According to the Pas-de-Calais archives, Briand opened the proceedings at half past two in the afternoon, and during the break the guests strolled along the seafront promenade. Three matters were on the agenda: the attitude towards Greece, the position of the army at Salonika, and Portugal’s participation in the war.

Greece between two governments

The Greek question came first and was the most delicate. Since 9 October Eleftherios Venizelos had been at Salonika at the head of a government of National Defence and was seeking its recognition, while in Athens the cabinet of Spyridon Lambros, regarded as a tool of King Constantine I, was in office. The Allies viewed Greece differently. The British official history of the war at sea writes that nothing so worried the government in London as the fear that French policy in Greece was aimed at the dynasty, and the British kept reminding Paris of the principle of non-interference in the constitutions of neutral states. Mistrust was deepened by the disarming of the Greek fleet on 11 October, which the French carried out without consulting London.

The outcome was a compromise. According to the British journalist Crawfurd Price, a supporter of Venizelos, it was decided at Boulogne not to recognise the Salonika government officially. The publicist George F. Abbott, sympathetic to the King, adds that the powers instructed their consuls to maintain relations with the provisional government “on a de facto footing” and at the same time gave it money. The Pas-de-Calais archives summarise the decision in similar terms: financial help without official recognition. At Boulogne the text was also agreed of the reply to the King’s proposal of September, conveyed by the Greek minister in London, that Greece should enter the war on its own terms. The British handed it to the minister on 23 October. In it the powers declared that they had never forced Greece into war and had demanded only the benevolent neutrality that had been promised, and that they would accept its entry only with “the necessary guarantees”, unless the government itself recognised that after the Bulgarian incursions into Kavala and Florina Greece was already at war with Bulgaria. Newbolt judges that in the changed situation the note no longer mattered.

Salonika and Portugal

The question of the army at Salonika, on which help for Romania depended, then suffering defeat after defeat, provoked a long debate. According to Falls, it was decided that the general staffs of Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia would examine what forces were needed on the Salonika front for defence, for continuing the offensive towards Monastir, and for a great attack on Bulgaria together with the Russians and Romanians. The French proposed that, without waiting for this, the number of British divisions be raised to seven and of French divisions to six, and the British promised to consider this “sympathetically”. The two governments were also to ask Italy to reinforce its forces at Salonika to three divisions. The Pas-de-Calais archives add that the French secured the continuation of the Salonika expedition, and that the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps, which Lisbon had decided to send to France, was assigned to the British army.

The question of the divisions was settled a few days later. On 25 October the Chief of the Imperial General Staff informed the commander of the British forces at Salonika, General George Milne, that in view of the insistence of the Allies and the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas II and President Raymond Poincaré, one more division would come from France. Robertson was against this, believing that the outcome of the war would be decided on the Western Front. London decided on a step towards the Venizelos government only at the end of December, when the new prime minister, Lloyd George, sent his representative to Salonika, and France did the same soon afterwards.