Greece apologises to the Allies

On 24 January 1917, or 11 January by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, the government of King Constantine I began to fulfil the most humiliating of the Entente’s demands. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the Greek government formally apologised to the Allies for the events of 1 December 1916, that is, for the fighting in Athens, in which Greek troops and reservists had fired on a landing party of French and British sailors. The British writer John Buchan gives the same date in his history of the war. The French publicist Auguste Gauvain, no friend of the king, spreads it over two days: on 24 January the Athens official gazette published the decree recalling General Konstantinos Kallaris, commander of I Corps, who had commanded the troops in the capital on 1 December, and on 25 January the Foreign Minister, Evgenios Zalokostas, sent the ministers of the four Powers a letter of apology.

The demands of 31 December

The apology was one of the conditions of the note which the ministers of France, Britain, Italy and Russia had presented to Athens on 31 December 1916. It supplemented the ultimatum of 14 December, which Greece had accepted the next day. The demands were divided into guarantees and reparation. The Greek army, with its arms and ammunition, was to move to the Peloponnese; gatherings of reservists north of the Peloponnese were banned; the government was to enforce strictly the ban on civilians carrying arms; and the Allies regained control of the police, telegraphs, telephones and railways. Political prisoners, that is, the Venizelists arrested after the bloody days of December, were to be released at once and compensated. The commander of I Corps was to be removed from his post unless the government could show that the orders of 1 December had been issued by another general. The American journalist Paxton Hibben, who sympathised with the king, wrote that the Greeks saw in this proviso a veiled allusion to the king himself and received it with great indignation. Finally, the government was to apologise formally to the Allied ministers, and the flags of Britain, France, Italy and Russia were to receive solemn honours in one of the squares of Athens, in the presence of the Minister of War and the whole garrison. The blockade of the coast was to continue until all the demands had been met.

Athens tried to bargain. The government of Spyridon Lambros accepted most of the conditions, but not the release of the prisoners without trial, and in return demanded a guarantee that Venizelos’s movement would not spread to the territories evacuated by the royal troops. The answer was a declaration drawn up at the Allied conference in Rome and delivered on 8 January: 48 hours to accept the demands. In it the Allies also promised not to allow the Venizelists to enter the areas evacuated by the army. The sources date the Greek acceptance differently. The British publicist George F. Abbott, who was well disposed towards the king, writes of an unconditional capitulation after an all-night crown council on 10 January. The New York monthly Current History and Gauvain state that the reply of 10 January still contained reservations, and that the crown council gave its final acceptance without reservations on 16 January. Soon afterwards the imprisoned Venizelists were released.

Zalokostas’s letter

The minister’s letter was short. According to the text quoted by Gauvain, the royal government, in accordance with the promise given in its reply to the ultimatum of 8 January, offered “its formal apologies to their Excellencies the Ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy and Russia for the regrettable events of 1 December 1916”. For the royalists it was a double humiliation. They held that on 1 December it was the Allies who had forced their way in arms into the capital of a neutral country, yet it was Greece that had to apologise, Greece which had also lost soldiers of its own in that fighting and whose capital had been shelled by French warships.

Honours for the flags

The last act of reparation took place on Monday 29 January in front of the Zappeion, the exhibition building in the gardens near the palace, where the French admiral had been besieged on 1 December. According to Gauvain, in the presence of the ministers and of detachments of the land and naval forces of the four Powers, Greek units under the command of a Greek general and the king’s brother, Prince Andrew, marched past, saluting the Allied flags. Buchan writes that soldiers and sailors representing all the Greek units still left in Athens stood in the square. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) mentions only the flags of Britain and France and notes that the ceremony passed off quietly, and that the spectators, who were not allowed near, behaved respectfully. On the same day the reservists’ associations were dissolved by decree.

The blockade continues

Meanwhile the transfer of troops to the Peloponnese was proceeding under the supervision of an Allied commission. According to Falls, by 18 January just under 9,000 men, 78 guns, 62 machine guns and over 32,000 rifles had been moved there. At the end of January the British controller, Brigadier-General Phillips, reported that the Greeks had earlier tried to evade their obligations but were now, under the pressure of the blockade and the threat of further steps, carrying out the move honestly. The French generals in Macedonia, Sarrail and Cauboue, saw it differently and demanded harsher measures. After the news of the ceremony in Athens, the British government ordered on 31 January that as many ships with cargoes be let through as were needed for Greece’s most urgent requirements, but the blockade was not lifted.

The verdict on these weeks depended on who gave it. Abbott wrote that Greece loyally fulfilled all its obligations, “grave and trivial”, and yet the blockade was tightened month by month. Gauvain held, on the contrary, that the Allies had obtained only a semblance of satisfaction, and that the king had emerged from the dispute cleared and with greater prestige, and went on evading the execution of the guarantees. The National Schism continued, and the blockade of the coast of royalist Greece was to last until June 1917.