Constantine agrees to the Salonika expedition

On 27 September 1915 a telegram reached London from Athens that seemed to end a week of uncertainty. The Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, informed the British through the British minister, Francis Elliot, that he had obtained the consent of King Constantine I to the dispatch of British and French troops to Salonika. He asked for them to arrive as quickly as possible, before the Greek divisions, which were to concentrate in Macedonia from 30 September, took over the only railway line. The message, however, had a second part. Officially the King was to know nothing until the troops were at the entrance to the harbour. Greece would then lodge a formal protest.

A week of conflicting signals

The affair began on 21 September, when after the announcement of Bulgarian mobilisation Venizelos asked France and Britain for 150,000 soldiers. They were to replace the Serbian army, which under the military convention of 1913 should have fielded that many men against Bulgaria, but, fighting Austria-Hungary, was unable to do so. The King and the general staff believed that without these forces the alliance with Serbia was not binding. Venizelos himself recounted that the same evening, just after he had made the request, the Marshal of the Court came to him with the King’s request that he should not approach the Entente. It was already too late. On 24 September the two powers promised troops.

Then a reply came from Athens that caused irritation in London. According to Elliot’s telegram of 25 September, the King did not for the time being wish troops to be sent, and Venizelos asked only that preparations should go ahead at full speed and that the units should wait at Mudros or at Mytilene on Lesbos. According to a later telegram from the minister, there was on the other hand no obstacle to supplies and horses going straight to Salonika and on inland, handled by men in civilian clothes, as if they were deliveries for Serbia. The British government, just then absorbed in the offensive in France, regarded such half-measures as unacceptable. On 27 September it sent a telegram to Athens rejecting the idea of smuggling in supplies and suspending the assembly of transports until the Greeks said clearly whether the troops would be received. This message crossed with the telegram about the King’s consent.

A formal protest

London replied that preparations for sending the troops were continuing, but did not agree to a protest, even a purely formal one. A landing in a foreign port against the host’s objection would be difficult, and Edward Grey feared that Germany would then proclaim that the Entente had violated Greek neutrality. Venizelos was to declare clearly that the troops would be welcome. That day General Ian Hamilton was instructed to prepare two divisions for withdrawal from Gallipoli, and the French were getting part of their forces at Cape Helles ready to move.

What did the King agree to?

The extent of the King’s consent remains disputed. Venizelos later recounted that when he reported to Constantine that troops were sailing for Salonika, the King said: “Very well, only let your protest at any rate be firm.” The Prime Minister replied that it would be firm, but only up to a point. The British author G. F. Abbott, sympathetic to the King, doubted this account and claimed that Constantine regarded the matter as closed, because he had demanded that no troops should come until Bulgaria attacked Serbia. Other accounts say that the King had withdrawn his consent to the approach to the Entente as early as 21 September. One thing is certain: there were two policies in Athens, the Prime Minister’s and the King’s, and Venizelos tried to pursue his own without breaking openly with the monarch.

The following days showed how fragile this understanding was. The very next day a reply came from Athens that seemed to revoke everything. The first Entente troops landed at Salonika only at the beginning of October, to a formal Greek protest, and Venizelos lost office almost at the same time.