Venizelos offers the Entente the fleet and troops

On 5 March 1915 the Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, went straight from a meeting of the Crown Council at the royal palace to the British Legation. To the Entente ministers gathered there he made a semi-official statement: the Greek government had decided that the Dardanelles operation gave it a convenient opportunity to pass from words to deeds, abandon neutrality and take part in it with the whole fleet and one division of troops. Venizelos admitted that the King had not yet given his consent. He wanted to gain time, because he was convinced that the Allies might stand before Constantinople within a few days.

From three divisions to one

Since 19 February the Anglo-French fleet had been bombarding the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles, and in London and Paris it was increasingly understood that the straits could not be taken without land forces. For Venizelos this was an opportunity he did not want to miss. In January Greece had twice refused the Entente help for Serbia, although London had promised it gains in Asia Minor in return, and in mid-February Venizelos rejected another appeal. Now taking part in the expedition against Turkey could secure Greece a place in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. On 1 March the Prime Minister proposed to the Entente that a corps of three Greek divisions be sent to the Gallipoli peninsula. He gave assurances that he had the King’s consent. According to his later account, Constantine I, long unconvinced, gave way only after another memorandum had been read to him, and said: “Then in God’s name.”

The General Staff, however, came out against the plan. Its deputy chief, Colonel Ioannis Metaxas, who as early as 1914 had studied the possibility of a Greek landing at the Dardanelles, argued in a memorandum that the expedition had little chance of success. The Turks, warned by the earlier bombardments, had had time to fortify the straits, a single corps could not decide the outcome of the fighting, and Greece, by sending troops far from home, would expose itself to an attack by Bulgaria. On 2 March Metaxas resigned, protesting that the Prime Minister was making military proposals to foreign states without consulting the General Staff.

The Crown Council

Metaxas’s resignation made an impression on Venizelos too. On his advice the King convened a Crown Council, at which the living former prime ministers sat alongside the King and the Prime Minister. It met on 3 and 5 March, which under the Julian calendar then in force in Greece was 18 and 20 February. At the first meeting Venizelos admitted that the soldiers’ objections might raise doubts, and declared that if the King chose neutrality, it would have to be pursued by a new government. At the second he tried to dismantle the General Staff’s arguments. He reduced the proposed contingent to one division, to be replaced at home by a reserve division, so that the army would remain ready to defend the country against the Bulgarians.

According to accounts of the deliberations, most of the former prime ministers then supported Venizelos. Dimitrios Rallis is even said to have urged the King to let a government that had the full confidence of the nation act. Constantine I did not give way. Accounts favourable to the King record his reply that if those present wished it, he was ready to abdicate. The General Staff still feared that one division would be only the beginning, and that once the Allies got stuck in the straits, Greece would be unable to refuse them more soldiers.

The Russian veto

Venizelos’s offer also ran into an obstacle in the Entente camp. Russia regarded Constantinople and the straits as its spoils of war, and on 4 March formally laid claim to them. A Greek army with a Greek king at its head entering the city that Greek nationalists considered their old capital was the last thing Petrograd wanted. As early as 3 March the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, informed the Allies that the Tsar would under no circumstances agree to Greek participation in the Dardanelles operation. The Russians would allow only Greek operations against Smyrna or elsewhere. The Russian minister in Athens later reportedly told a Greek diplomat that Russia would gladly agree to large Greek gains in Asia Minor, but preferred not to let Greece into Constantinople.

The other Allies were also in no hurry to reply. London treated Venizelos’s statement as a preliminary step and announced that it would take up the matter only after a formal decision by the King. France and Russia stressed, moreover, that Greece could not confine itself to war with Turkey but must be ready to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary as well. These replies, however, no longer had any bearing on events in Athens. The next day Constantine I refused to approve the Prime Minister’s plan.