Greece rejects Serbia's request for help

On 10 October 1915 the Serbian minister in Athens heard from the Greek Prime Minister, Alexandros Zaimis, the answer his government had been dreading for several weeks. The Serbs, who for four days had been defending themselves in the north against the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, expected a Bulgarian attack at any moment. They held that the expected Bulgarian attack was a casus foederis, that is, a case provided for in the Greek-Serbian alliance concluded in 1913 in Salonika. They therefore asked whether the Greek army was ready to act against the Bulgarians and whether the government in Athens would instruct the general staff to agree a plan of joint operations with the Serbian staff. Zaimis refused. The date of 10 October is given by the history of Greece’s part in the war published by the Greek staff, and on the same day the Italian minister in Athens reported to Rome on the Prime Minister’s conversation with the Serbian minister. Venizelos’s biographer Vincent Seligman wrote of 11 October, and the written answer, later published in the Greek White Book, is dated 29 September in the Julian calendar, that is 12 October.

A Balkan war or a European one

According to the account of the Italian minister, Carlo De Bosdari, Zaimis told the Serbs plainly that Greece did not consider herself bound by the alliance to go to war with Austria-Hungary. Assurances to this effect had been received in Vienna immediately after the treaty was concluded, and in the autumn of 1913 they had been conveyed to Emperor Franz Joseph by Zaimis himself, sent on a mission to announce the accession of King Constantine I. Greece would enter the war in only one case: if Bulgaria attacked Greece herself. The Prime Minister added that he was almost certain this would not happen, because he had received the most reassuring assurances on the matter from Bulgaria and from Germany. Zaimis spoke in the same vein with the ministers of Russia and France, and the British minister was told the same by other ministers: Georgios Theotokis, Stefanos Dragoumis and Dimitrios Gounaris. De Bosdari concluded that there could no longer be any doubt about Greece’s attitude.

The written answer, sent to the Greek minister in Niš with instructions to read it to the Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić, developed these arguments. The alliance had been concluded to maintain the balance of power in the Balkans after the division of the lands taken from Turkey, and according to its preamble it was of a “purely Balkan” character. The treaty and the military convention provided only for an attack by Bulgaria alone on one of the allies. If one of the parties were waging war with several states at once, promising it “weak and ridiculous” help would, in Athens’s view, be an act of absurd presumption. Yet a Bulgarian attack, if it came, would be the result of an agreement with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, combined with the invasion by the Central Powers already under way, in other words an episode of the European war. Serbia had admitted this herself, it was argued, when, following the Entente powers, she broke off relations with Bulgaria without first consulting her Balkan ally.

An army in reserve

Athens also argued that Greek help would not serve the common cause. Entering the war under such conditions, Greece would perish without saving Serbia. The common interest required that the Greek forces remain in reserve and the country “neutral and under arms”, as the government had announced two days earlier. The government assured the Serbs of its deep regret and promised all the help and facilities its international position allowed. Behind this answer lay the calculations of the Greek staff, which as early as September had warned the government that without the 150,000 Serbian soldiers stipulated in the convention, a war with Bulgaria would be Greece asking for its own destruction. According to the Greek official history, when the Serbian Colonel Milan Milovanović came to Athens in those days, Ioannis Metaxas explained to him that sending two Greek corps to Serbia would expose eastern Macedonia and allow the Bulgarians to cut the communications of both armies. He proposed instead a joint offensive against Bulgaria, but the Serbs had no forces to spare for it.

As the British writer G. F. Abbott, sympathetic to the king, observed, the Entente powers did not challenge the Greek interpretation, because they themselves had for many months been urging Serbia and Greece to make concessions to Bulgaria, against the spirit of an alliance concluded, after all, against her. Venizelos, however, regarded the refusal as a breach of the word given to an ally, and his supporters repeated this charge against the king for years. The very next day the first Bulgarian-Serbian clashes took place, and on 14 October Bulgaria formally declared war on Serbia. Serbia was left alone between three armies. When in the second half of October Britain tried to induce Greece to go to war by promising her Cyprus, Athens rejected this offer too.