Venizelos leaves Athens

Early in the morning of 25 September 1916, or 12 September by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos left Athens. The British journalist Crawfurd Price, an ardent supporter of Venizelos, described the departure with drama. When the last strollers had left the promenade at seaside Phaleron, the favourite resort of Athenian high society, several cars full of muffled figures drove up to the pier. Out of them stepped Venizelos, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis and several leaders of the Liberal Party, among them Miltiadis Negropontis and Emmanouil Repoulis. In silence they walked to the end of the pier, boarded a motor launch and crossed to the steamer Hesperia, which was waiting in the roadstead. The British official history of the war at sea gives the date as 24 September and also names among Venizelos’s companions the diplomat Nikolaos Politis and General Panagiotis Danglis, but according to reports in the London Daily Chronicle of 27 September Danglis sailed from Athens separately, on a Greek destroyer. The ship was bound for Crete, Venizelos’s native island, escorted by French warships.

Last hesitation

Venizelos had taken a long time to reach his decision. Since the revolt in Salonika, where at the end of August his supporters had renounced their allegiance to Athens, he had hesitated over whether to lead a movement that was splitting the state. The British publicist George F. Abbott, sympathetic to the king, writes on the basis of the memoirs of the French Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet that as early as 18 September the French minister had warned the admiral of Venizelos’s imminent departure, and a French escort had been prepared for him. At the last moment, however, the politician did not sail. Asked by an Associated Press correspondent whether he would lead the movement, he replied: “I cannot answer now. I must wait a little longer and see what the government intends to do.”

The government of Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos, appointed on 16 September, gave him no grounds for hope. The Allies regarded the cabinet as partisan and unfriendly, and when they demanded that Greece declare war on Bulgaria as proof of its good will, King Constantine I drew back. Meanwhile the Bulgarians had occupied Kavala, and most of the Greek IV Corps had surrendered to the Germans. According to Price, on 22 September the Committee of National Defence sent the first battalion of volunteers from Salonika to the front, and on 23 September a rising broke out on Crete.

Venizelos himself later said that he had finally been persuaded by a barber. His friend, the shipowner Embirikos, repeated to him the words of his barber, a fervent Venizelist: since Venizelos says the country is heading for disaster, why does he not prevent it? The politician admitted that this shamed him, because his hesitation might have sprung from selfishness and fear for what he had built up. He took his doubts to Kountouriotis, the hero of the victorious naval battles against the Turks in the First Balkan War. Price stressed that the admiral, a straightforward sailor, enjoyed universal respect, kept out of party quarrels and was sincerely devoted to the throne. The admiral not only urged him to act, but decided to take part himself.

“This is not a revolution”

Before leaving, Venizelos made a statement to a British journalist, which the London Times published on 27 September. In it he said that he was going to the islands to lead a movement that wanted to fight the Bulgarian invader, who was occupying Greek Macedonia and wronging its inhabitants. “The betrayal of Kavala, following the loss of Fort Rupel, Serres, Drama and the greater part of Greek Macedonia, has brought about such a crisis in the very existence of my country that I can no longer resist the call of my compatriots,” he declared. He assured them that he had exhausted every means of persuading those in power to defend the country, and that recently, through one of the Entente ministers, he had even offered the king his own withdrawal from politics, if that would make the decision easier for him. “Do not think that I am at the head of a revolution in the ordinary sense of the word,” he added. In his view the movement was not directed against the king or the dynasty and was to be a last attempt to induce Constantine to place himself at the head of the nation.

Not everyone on the Allied side welcomed the departure. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, still hoped for a reconciliation between Venizelos and the king. Dartige du Fournet wrote in his memoirs that he watched this “exodus” with regret, because the army, the fleet and the government offices, abandoned by the friends of the Entente, were passing entirely into the hands of its opponents. The British official history agrees with him: from that moment the Allies had to reckon with the stubborn resistance of the Greek administration. The next day the Hesperia reached the shores of Crete, where cheering crowds were waiting for Venizelos.