Resignation of the Kalogeropoulos government

On 3 October 1916, that is, 20 September according to the Julian calendar used by Greece, the government of Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos fell apart in Athens. According to a dispatch filed from Athens that day by the “New York Times” correspondent, all the ministers except the prime minister and the foreign minister, Alexandros Karapanos, handed their resignations to the king, and the capital expected Kalogeropoulos to try to reconstruct the cabinet. The next morning, 4 October, the king accepted the resignation of the whole government. This is why the British chronology of the war and the chronology of the American annual “The American Year Book” record the fall of the cabinet under 3 October, while the British writer George F. Abbott, the Greek author S. P. P. Cosmetatos, a supporter of the king, and the British author J. Selden Willmore write of the resignation of 4 October.

A government no one would talk to

The cabinet, formed on 16 September, never had a chance with the Allies. France and Britain regarded it as a party government, and therefore contrary to the June note of the powers, and did not maintain normal relations with it. According to Abbott, who was sympathetic to the king, Kalogeropoulos and his ministers sought contact with them in vain for three weeks, even offering to remove members of the government who were unacceptable to the Entente. When they heard unofficially that the powers would accept an alliance only on condition of an immediate declaration of war on Bulgaria, they agreed to that too, but in return for military and financial aid and support for Greek claims after the war. The reply was to be delivered into the hands of the king himself because, as the Greeks learned, the Entente governments did not recognise the cabinet. Willmore, who was hostile to the king, wrote briefly that the government resigned because it had been unable to establish relations with the representatives of the protecting powers.

The British official history of the war at sea adds that the Entente ministers were instructed to demand that Greece declare war on Bulgaria by 1 October at the latest and form a government capable of conducting a truly national policy. At a conference in the crown prince’s palace King Constantine I, faced with the demand for immediate war, backed down. A few days later he is said to have proposed to Paris that the Allies should order him by ultimatum to declare war. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, believed that the king wanted in this way to proclaim mobilisation as if against his own will. The Entente governments could not agree to this. Athens also had another problem: according to the same dispatch of 3 October, state expenditure in September had reached the equivalent of 4 million dollars, and less than 100,000 remained in the treasury.

The Crown Council of 4 October

On the morning of 4 October the king presided over a Crown Council in the palace. Each minister presented his assessment of the situation in writing and attached his resignation to it, which the king could accept if the opinion did not suit him. The correspondent of the London “Daily Chronicle” reported that the prime minister and four ministers came out in favour of abandoning neutrality, while those against included the Minister of the Interior, Loukas Roufos, whom the British regarded as an open opponent of the Entente. The king accepted the resignation of the whole cabinet. According to dispatches from Athens, a “national war government” including three Venizelists was announced, and Dimitrios Diamantidis, a minister in the former government of Eleftherios Venizelos, was summoned to the palace for consultations.

At the same time the king’s entourage sounded out Venizelos himself, who for a week had been at the head of a provisional government in Chania. He was asked whether, in the event of a declaration of war on Bulgaria, he would demand the premiership for himself or would support a government in which his people sat. According to the correspondent of the London “Daily Telegraph” in Chania, he replied that he would support any cabinet that took the Greek army into the field alongside the Entente, and wanted no portfolio either for himself or for his supporters. His closest associates, however, did not believe in Athens’ sincerity and thought that the king merely wanted to gain time. The same journalist added that if Constantine was sincere, he could easily prove it: he had only to proclaim mobilisation at once and appoint Venizelos prime minister.

What came next

Nothing came of the war government. The king looked for a candidate outside the world of the parties, and on 8 October he entrusted the task of forming a cabinet to the historian Professor Spyridon Lambros, who assembled a government of professors and officials. The change did not spare Greece further pressure. The French Vice-Admiral Dartige du Fournet, commander of the Allied fleet off Salamis, was already preparing new demands on Greece on orders from Paris, and Venizelos was sailing through the islands of the Aegean to Salonika.