Venizelos asks for 150,000 Entente troops

On the evening of 21 September 1915 the Prime Minister of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, summoned the envoys of France, Great Britain and Russia to the foreign ministry in Athens. He asked them whether France and Great Britain would be ready to send 150,000 troops to the Balkans at once, and troops from Europe, not colonial ones. The envoys promised to telegraph their governments immediately. We know the course of the meeting from a telegram by the Italian envoy in Athens, Carlo De Bosdari, sent to Rome half an hour after midnight. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign gives the date as 22 September, probably the day the telegrams reached London. Venizelos himself later said that he had summoned the envoys at about seven in the evening, after returning from a conversation with the King.

News from Sofia

That day the Greek government received official word from Sofia of the conclusion of the Bulgarian–Turkish agreement and of the decision to mobilise the Bulgarian army. Tsar Ferdinand signed the decree only the following day. Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov presented the mobilisation as a purely precautionary step: since Austria-Hungary and Germany were preparing to attack Serbia and the war was approaching Bulgaria’s borders, the country had to move to “armed neutrality”. According to other reports Bulgarian cavalry was already moving towards the Serbian border. Venizelos did not rule out that Sofia was only testing the waters, but he judged the situation very dangerous. In reality, two weeks earlier Bulgaria had secretly bound itself to Germany.

Greece was bound to Serbia by an alliance concluded in Salonika on 1 June 1913, just before the Second Balkan War, and by a military convention attached to it. In the event of a Bulgarian attack Greece was to field 90,000 troops and Serbia 150,000, concentrated at designated places. In mid-September, however, the Greek general staff received a report from its envoy in Serbia, Colonel Vlachopoulos. The Serbs had admitted to him that they could throw at most one or two divisions against Bulgaria, and in the south, the area most important to Greece, only recruits of the 1915 class. On 14 September the general staff warned the government that a war with Bulgaria without Serbian support would be courting destruction for Greece. King Constantine I and the chief of staff concluded that since Serbia could not field the agreed forces, Greece was free of its obligations.

Conversation at Tatoi

Venizelos, who had returned to power only a month earlier, wanted to honour the alliance. According to his own account, given later in parliament, at five in the afternoon of 21 September he drove to Tatoi, the King’s residence outside the city. For an hour and a half he tried to persuade Constantine that Greece and Serbia could beat the Bulgarians before the Germans moved larger forces to the Balkans. The King agreed to mobilisation, but not to war. When Venizelos invoked the voters who in June had backed his policy, Constantine is said to have replied that in internal affairs he listened to the will of the people, but for foreign policy he was answerable to God. We know these words only from Venizelos’s recollection, and the King’s opponents later repeated them as proof that he regarded himself as a ruler by divine right. The prime minister offered his resignation, but the King asked him to stay, because in the face of Bulgarian mobilisation not a single day could be lost.

Venizelos then proposed asking the British and French whether they could themselves supply the 150,000 troops the Serbs lacked. “Of course,” the King is said to have replied, “but they must be troops from the mother countries, not colonial ones.” Venizelos later admitted that he had not taken this as consent to abandon neutrality. When, after the conversation with the envoys, he returned to work, the Marshal of the Court arrived with the King’s request that he should not approach the Entente. The prime minister replied that he had already done so.

The prime minister’s conditions

Venizelos maintained that he had told the envoys about the mobilisation order then being signed. The Italian envoy’s telegram from that night, however, reads differently: the prime minister hoped that a promise of Entente help would allow him to persuade the King and the chief of staff to mobilise, if the Bulgarian mobilisation was confirmed. The help would not be needed if Romania mobilised in the meantime. Venizelos also gave to understand confidentially that if Greece did not answer the Bulgarian mobilisation with its own, he would not be able to remain in power. According to most sources the mobilisation decree was signed only on 23 September.

De Bosdari did not hide his resentment. He had not been invited to the meeting, and Venizelos had not once mentioned Italy, speaking exclusively of French and British help. The envoy concluded that the Greek prime minister did not want to see Italian troops in the Balkans. For the Entente this was a request quite different from that of February, when it had offered Greece two divisions and Venizelos had judged them too weak a force. Now it was Athens that named the number, and London and Paris had to find the men at a moment when they were preparing a great offensive in France and were still fighting at Gallipoli.