Greece accepts the December ultimatum

On 15 December 1916, or 2 December by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, the government of Spyridon Lambros accepted the ultimatum handed to it the day before by the ministers of France, Britain, Italy and Russia. The powers demanded that Greek troops leave Thessaly and Epirus and that all movements of units northwards cease. According to the New York monthly Current History, the deadline expired at three in the afternoon. The same monthly reported that the decision was approved by the Council of Ministers together with a Crown Council chaired by King Constantine I.

An answer under the guns

The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, awaited the answer aboard the steamer Abbassiyeh at Piraeus. According to the British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt), the Greek government sent its envoy there with a note accepting the terms. The American journalist Paxton Hibben, sympathetic to the king, writes that the answer was brought by the Foreign Minister himself, Evgenios Zalokostas. Before it arrived, the French admiral had a warning posted at the town hall in Piraeus: the inhabitants were to close their shops and stay indoors from four in the afternoon, because a bombardment was threatened. This is described both by Hibben and by the British publicist George F. Abbott, also sympathetic to the king.

Zalokostas’s note was short. The royal government, “desiring to give once more an evident proof of the sincere friendship which has never ceased to animate it towards the Entente”, accepted the demands contained in the ultimatum. The minister at the same time expressed the hope that the powers would reconsider their announced intention of maintaining the blockade of the Greek coasts and islands, which was souring relations and having a bad effect on public opinion, and would believe that the best guarantee against future misunderstandings was the sincere wish of the government and the nation to return as soon as possible to their former friendship with the four powers. Abbott writes that the government at once issued orders for the transfer of troops and war material.

The Peloponnese trap

The concession did not come easily. Hibben claims that some of those around the king advised him to put himself at the head of the nation and defend himself in the mountains of Thessaly. The Athens daily Chronos wrote: “War is no worse than hunger. If the noose round our necks is tightened any further, let there be war and let us be done with it”. According to Abbott, the Greeks received the government’s submission with loud disapproval. Critics reproached it with returning, instead of using the events of 1 December to clear up the situation, to the path of concessions that had led to them, and with encouraging the powers to make ever greater demands. Nor did the Greeks believe the official reason. The note said that the Allies wanted only to secure their army in Macedonia against attack, while in Athens it was widely believed that the aim was to bring in Venizelos and remove the king. Constantine, as the British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) relates, bitterly called the Peloponnese a “mousetrap”. On the peninsula, whose shores were watched by the Allied fleet, his army could no longer threaten anyone.

The march began quickly. Newbolt writes that by 17 December Allied control officers in Larissa and Ioannina were supervising the first transports of troops to the Peloponnese. On 18 December the government in Athens gave assurances in a note to the powers that the transfer of units was proceeding within the set time, despite difficulties caused by the population. On 22 December Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, explained in the House of Commons that the troops were being withdrawn from Thessaly and Epirus in order to protect the rear and flank of the Allied army, and not so that Venizelos’s authority could move into the evacuated lands.

The blockade continues

The acceptance of the ultimatum did not end the crisis. The blockade of the coasts continued, because the note had announced it until Greece gave satisfaction for the attack on the Allies in Athens and guarantees for the future, and these the powers had not yet specified. On 22 December the new British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, explained in reply to an MP’s question that the ultimatum of 14 December had been based above all on concern for the security of the Army of the Orient. The further demands, which were being worked on, would in any case include the release of political prisoners and compensation for those who had suffered unjustly. This referred to the Venizelists arrested and beaten in Athens after 1 December.

The Allies presented these demands in a note of 31 December, and the Greek government accepted them only in mid-January 1917. Falls notes that Athens tried to bargain and the matter was not closed when an Allied conference met in Rome on 5 January. Venizelos’s biographer S. B. Chester later wrote that the transfer of troops to the Peloponnese was never fully carried out. The blockade, which weighed ever more heavily on the population, lasted until June 1917.