As France anticipated, with foreign credits
cut off and a progressive fall in the exchange, the expense of
maintaining a large army on a war footing proved too heavy for the
National Exchequer. And that was not the worst. France, who since the
Armistice had betrayed a keen jealousy of England's place in a part of
the world in which she claims special rights, presently concluded a
separate agreement with Turkey--an example in which she was followed by
Italy--and gave the Turks her moral and material support in their
struggle with the Greeks; while England, though refusing to reverse her
policy in favour of their enemies, contented herself with giving the
Greeks only a platonic encouragement, which they were unwise enough to
take for more than it was worth.

Everyone knows the melancholy sequel: our unhappy "allies," left to
their own exhausted resources, were driven from the Asiatic territories
which in common prudence they should never have entered; and the
overseas Empire which M. Venizelos had conjured up vanished in smoke.

The rout in Asia Minor had its repercussion in Greece. For nearly two
years the people, though war-worn and on the edge of bankruptcy, bore
the financial as they had borne the famine blockade, trusting that
England would at any moment come forth to counter the vindictiveness of
France, and sturdily resisted all the efforts of the Venizelist party
to shake the stability of the Royalist regime: Constantine again
appeared in their eyes as a victim of the Cretan's intrigues. But the
loss of Ionia and the danger of the loss of Thrace; the horror and
{235} despair arising from the sack of Smyrna, whence shiploads of
broken refugees fled to the Greek ports; all this, reinforced by an
idea that the maintenance of the King on the throne prevented the
effective expression of British friendship and his fall would remove
French hostility, created conditions before which questions of
personalities for once faded into insignificance, and put into the
hands of M. Venizelos's partisans an irresistible lever.

On 26 September an army of 15,000 insurgent soldiers landed near Athens
and demanded the abdication of the King. The loyal troops were ready
to meet force by force. But the King, in order to avert a fratricidal
struggle which would have dealt Greece the finishing stroke, forbade
opposition and immediately abdicated, "happy," as he said, "that
another opportunity has been given me to sacrifice myself